Recipes · Plant Forward Cooking

Vegan Friendly French Onion Soup: Deeply Caramelized Onions, Red Wine and a Cheesy Toast Crown for Cold Nights

Beef stock is traditional, but it is not what makes this soup. Slowly browned onions, a splash of red wine, vegetable broth and a few savory pantry boosters deliver the dark, rich flavor, and every part of it can be made without animal products.

Patience is the only real ingredient. Everything else is a pantry staple.

French onion soup has a reputation as restaurant food, a bowl with a bubbling lid of cheese that arrives at the table too hot to touch. In reality it is one of the most forgiving recipes in the soup repertoire, because the work is mostly waiting. Food blogger Brita Britnell of Food with Feeling has developed a version that swaps beef stock for vegetable broth and builds the missing depth from other ingredients, and the result is a soup that suits cold evenings and fits a vegetarian table, with simple changes to make it fully vegan. It serves four, takes about an hour and 25 minutes from start to finish, and involves roughly 15 minutes of preparation. As more cooks look to reduce meat in everyday meals, a recipe like this one also fits a broader shift that the Sustainable Action Now climate reporting has followed closely, since food system analyses consistently find that beef carries a far larger greenhouse gas footprint per serving than vegetable based cooking.

Why Caramelized Onions Do the Heavy Lifting

The foundation of the soup is three pounds of yellow onions, about five large ones, peeled and sliced into half moons. Onions contain natural sugars and a great deal of water. When they cook slowly in fat, the water evaporates, the sugars brown and deepen, and the onions turn from sharp and pungent to sweet, jammy and dark. That browning is what stands in for the roasted, savory notes of beef stock, which is why this recipe puts so much of its time into the first stage. The method here is gradual. The onions cook in olive oil over medium high heat for about 20 minutes, until they soften, then the butter goes in and they cook for another 15 to 20 minutes until they begin to brown. A teaspoon of sugar and one and a half teaspoons of salt follow, and the onions cook for 15 more minutes, with the garlic added in the final couple of minutes. The author’s advice is to watch the pot closely and lower the heat if any pieces start to scorch, because the goal is to brown them slowly, not burn them.

Building a Meaty Broth Without the Meat

With the onions deeply browned, the pot is deglazed with a half cup of red wine, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom and sides with a wooden spoon, since those bits hold much of the flavor. Eight cups of vegetable broth, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, two bay leaves, a tablespoon of fresh thyme and half a teaspoon of black pepper go in next, and the soup simmers covered for 30 minutes, with a stir every few minutes. The wine adds acidity, depth and the dark color usually associated with beef broth, and the recipe suggests a merlot or pinot noir. Cooks who prefer to skip alcohol can use an equal amount of extra vegetable broth with a small splash of soy sauce.

Two notes on the ingredients matter for anyone cooking vegetarian or vegan. Some Worcestershire sauces contain fish sauce or anchovies, so the recipe calls for a vegan version or at least a vegetarian one after checking the label. And vegetable broths vary widely in salt, so if yours is low sodium, a little more salt may be needed at the end. Fresh thyme is recommended for the best flavor, although dried thyme can substitute.

Brown the onions slowly, and the soup will do the rest.

The Toast, the Cheese and the Broil

The signature of the dish is the bread. Four thick slices of French bread, ideally a good baguette, are brushed or sprayed with oil and toasted on a baking sheet in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven for 10 minutes, flipped halfway through, until lightly golden. The soup is seasoned to taste, ladled into ovenproof bowls and topped with the toast, and a cup of freshly grated Gruyere is scattered across the four bowls. The bowls then go on a large baking tray under the broiler until the cheese melts and bubbles at the edges. For a version without dairy, the cheese is simply omitted or replaced with a vegan alternative, and the author recommends Violife’s vegan parmesan. Swiss, fontina or another melting cheese also works for those who eat dairy.

If you do not have ovenproof bowls, or prefer to skip the broiling step, melt the cheese on the toast first and then set the toast on top of the soup just before serving. Serve immediately, since the crouton begins to soften quickly as it absorbs broth.

A Note on Sodium and Serving

The recipe’s automatically generated nutrition estimate lists 683 calories per serving, with 75 grams of carbohydrates, 21 grams of protein, 32 grams of fat, 8 grams of fiber and about 3,489 milligrams of sodium. The sodium figure is high, driven mainly by the broth, salt and cheese, so cooks who are watching their salt intake should choose a low sodium broth and season at the end. These values are estimates and will change with the brands you use.

The soup keeps well, and the flavor often improves after a day, so the caramelized onion base can be made ahead and finished with the bread and cheese just before serving. For a complete meal, a simple green salad and a glass of the same red wine used in the pot would round it out.