The Unreal Meal

I’ve been reading Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef recently (on the heels of Ratio, actually), and it’s done a lot to open my mind and the way I think about what food is.  Specifically, there’s a part where he’s describing Bob del Grosso and one class that he taught that centered around a discussion on what food actually is.  To quote the book (which quotes del Grosso):

“Say you’re a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger.  You would begin the process by posing a question: ‘What is a hamburger?’” He posed this to the class.  One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.”  Del Grosso clarified: “Round?  Let’s call it disc-shaped.”  A lively discussion of the hamburger followed.  The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food.

This, of course, got me thinking critically about food.  It started with the hamburger question — does it have to be round (or disc-shaped, as it were)?  Does it even have to be beef?  What if it’s ground pork, and it’s triangular, does that make it any less a burger?  What if it’s not between a bun, but on toast (a patty melt) or an english muffin or something completely different?  Does that change the intrinsic burgerness about it?  So of course, I’ve been thinking about everything in that manner since I read that, including the old standard, French Onion Soup.

It started with onions, a pretty key component to French Onion Soup.  In fact, I’d venture to say that without the onions, you can’t have French Onion Soup.  Traditionally, it’s made from deeply caramelized onions in some kind of stock with a toasted crouton floating on top and melted cheese over it all.  It’s simple, it’s delicious, it’s pretty much perfect, so why fuck with it, right?  Well, why not, actually!  Can it be improved upon, probably not, but my thinking was that it could be altered a bit and still be, well, really freakin’ delicious.

So we come back to the onions.  What goes really well with deliciously caramelized onions?  Steak!    And what goes well with steak?  Potatoes!  The wheels in my brain started turning.  What if I made onion soup the normal way, then tossed in some beef, and instead of a crouton, I could top it with a potato cake made from shredded potatoes, then the cheese.  It’d still be French Onion Soup at its roots, but just a little different.

It just so happens that I cooked a beautiful 2 lb sirloin for dinner on Monday, but with only four people in the house, I had leftovers (even after making sandwiches from it).  I also had a couple quarts of chicken stock because I’d roasted a chicken on Saturday for some friends, and I never let a good chicken carcass go to waste.  I even had a random spare bag of frozen hash browns that had accidentally been delivered to me as part of my last Fresh Direct order (I’d never order these, to be fair, but since they were there, I thought it silly to waste them).  Oddly, the one thing I was missing was onions, as I’d used the last of my 10 lb. bag of them for the chicken stock, but onions can be gotten easily enough, and I asked Alex to pick some up on his way home last night.

I thinly sliced my onions, put them in a stock pot to cook down and caramelize, diced up the remaining steak, warmed up my chicken stock, and proceeded to cook up some hash browns in a small round that would fit in a soup bowl, then finally assembled the whole shebang, topping it with some mozzarella cheese (it was all I had, and sometimes ya gotta make due).  The result was a pretty good soup.  I should have deglazed the onions with a little white wine for some acidity, but I didn’t have that, so instead I added in a splash of red wine vinegar at the end.  It went from a good soup that seemed a little lacking somehow to a really good soup that had much more balance and depth.  Pictures and recipe are below (clicking on the pictures will give you the ginormous version)!

Monday's Sirloin Dinner

Thinly Sliced Onions

Steak, All Diced Up

Deliciously Carmelized Onions, After about an Hour of Cooking

Tasty Potato Cake

Mmmm... soup!

“French” Onion (and Steak and Potato) Soup

3 lbs thinly sliced onions
2 quarts chicken stock (beef stock could be substituted, but then it would be overly beefy, I think)
1 cup dry white wine
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
2 bay leaves
4 sprigs fresh thyme, tied in a bundle
6 ounces rare to medium rare sirloin, diced
4 cups shredded potatoes
2 cups grated gruyère (or other delicious and easily meltable) cheese
coarse salt, to taste (I use almost exclusively Morton Coarse Kosher Salt)
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

In a large dutch oven or stockpot, put all the onions, the two bay leaves, and the bundle of thyme over medium-low heat.  Season with a liberal sprinkling of kosher salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Let the onions heat up and cook down, stirring in the pan every ten minutes or so, until all the moisture has cooked off and they start to get a deep brown, caramel color.  That took over an hour for me, and it’s worth waiting that and letting the process happen slowly.  It can be done faster, but the onions have more a tendency to burn and get bitter that way, and that’s not so much the makings of an unreal meal!

Once the onions are deliciously brown, and they’ve started to form an onion equivalent of fond on the bottom of the pan, fish out the bay leaves and deglaze the whole shebang with the white wine.  You’ll get a wonderful burst of steam to give you a nice wine facial — it smells divine; I nearly wanted to dive into the pot.  Stir with a flat edged wooden spoon or a heat-resistant spatula to pick up the little bits of onion that have stuck to the bottom, and continue to cook until the wine has almost completely cooked off.  Stir in the vinegar.

Add the chicken stock to the onions, stirring so that the onions don’t stick to the bottom of the pot, and bring everything to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  It was at this point that I chose to dice up my steak and grate my cheese.  Once the stock and onions have simmered for about five minutes, add the steak and turn the heat as low as it will go while cooking the potato cakes.

For each potato cake, use about 1/2 cup of shredded potatoes.  In this instance, I used frozen hash browns, which are very dry and easy to cook to a crisp golden brown.  If you are using fresh potatoes, make sure that as much water as possible has been squeezed out or you’ll end up steaming the potatoes and they’ll be soggy, mushy, and not browned at all.  I find that a non-stick skillet is perfect for this, and I tend to use non-stick cooking spray rather than oil, because I feel that it makes the individual potato pieces adhere to one another well while crisping perfectly on the outside.

Cooked over medium heat, the frozen potatoes take about 4 minutes per side for each potato cake, depending on how thick you want them.  Mine were about 1/2″ thick, so they spread out a little (mostly because I was using a wide-mouthed soup bowl).  If you wanted them thicker, more like a crabcake, it would probably take longer to cook (but be sure to flip them so that they don’t burn).

Once the potatoes are cooked, ladle the soup into a bowl, top with a potato cake, and sprinkle with 1/4 c of shredded cheese.  The whole thing can be placed under a broiler to melt the cheese and crisp up the top of it.  I forewent that step because our broiler is an old-fashioned one underneath the bottom of the oven, and it’s occasionally challenging to get things in and out of there.  I really want a new range, but how does one justify buying a new range for an apartment that one rents? :p

The final product makes about 8 servings, depending on how big your appetite and whether you’re choosing to make a whole meal of this, or if you’re serving it as an appetizer.  Had I chosen to put these in the wonderful little soup tureens that I have, we probably could have gotten 8 servings.  As it was, it turned out to be about five dinner-sized portions.  Oh, and don’t forget to pull the thyme bundle!  Most of the leaves will probably have fallen off, so it’ll likely be a bunch of naked stems tied together.  Don’t be alarmed — that’s a good thing!