What's The Best Type Of Alcohol To Use In Traditional French Onion Soup?

Soup is a supreme feel-good food that can be just as comforting to make as it is to eat. While you could create your own riff off a recipe, sometimes it's hard to beat the classics. A traditional French onion soup is an iconic mixture of onions and broth topped with a cheesy bread crust that has roots as far back as 1651. Looking at a recipe, you'll see common ingredients that make for a simple yet down-to-earth mixture and instant staple. But what's that? French onion soup contains alcohol?

As a matter of fact, it does. Traditional French onion soup includes wine that, when cooked down with the other ingredients, leaves its bold warmth behind to help build up the soup's flavor. While different recipes include various types of wine, many agree that the best alcohol to include is sherry. Sherry is a fortified wine that is great on its own, but one of the things you might not know about sherry is that it's also great for cooking. It's known to be a sweeter wine with a fruity and nutty taste, something that perfectly complements the caramelized onions key to making French onion soup. Not only does the sherry help deglaze your pan, but it infuses the broth and ingredients with its sweetness to tie the whole dish together. So, while you may be tempted to skip out on the wine or only add a small amount to your recipe, be sure to use sherry.

Since wine is a key flavor component in French onion soup, you want to treat it like the other major ingredients and give it enough time to truly infuse into the dish. In fact, a common mistake when adding wine to pasta sauce or soup broth is not letting it simmer for long enough. To prevent this, the best time to add your sherry is when your onions are beginning to caramelize so that they finish cooking in the wine and absorb the taste as the alcohol evaporates. Your onions will naturally take on the sweet, earthy flavors of the wine and anything left in the pan will incorporate into the broth.

While sherry seems to be the crowd favorite, it doesn't mean it is the one and only alcohol you can turn to for French onion soup. Some prefer to substitute with dry white wine, while others swear by brandy instead. Brandy is a distilled alcohol that comes from a similar part of the world to sherry and shares a similar bold, nutty taste. While not identical, brandy can be substituted for sherry in your recipe for a unique warmth that blends equally well with the caramelized onions and broth. To spice things up even further, you can also swap the Gruyère in your French onion soup with something equally rich like Swiss cheese or the French Comté — both will top the soup nicely and pair well with the depth of flavor provided by the wine.