Your Instant Pot Is Key For Way Easier French Onion Soup

One of the great comfort foods in this world is French onion soup. On a cold day, a warm bowl with its hint of sweetness and crispy cheesy bread is the perfect thing to wrap yourself around. Sadly, if you want to make it yourself and do it right, it normally takes an excruciatingly long time.

Traditional French onion soup relies on the principle of simple ingredients prepared well. The most important element is, undoubtedly, the onions themselves which need to be fully caramelized to bring out their full depth of flavor. While other recipes rely on adding a host of other ingredients to develop flavor, this is all about what's there naturally.

The good news is that an Instant Pot can keep all of that complexity of flavor intact while massively reducing the cook time. Not only is it faster, but the Instant Pot's magic cuts out the need for standing over the soup the whole time and stirring. It all comes down to how the pressure cooker acts on those onions.

French onion soup is, in essence, caramelized onion soup. You'll find recipes that claim you can caramelize onions in 15 to 20 minutes. While you might be able to burn onions in that time, the true moist, sweet, and lightly brown onions that we're looking for are going to be possible in that time. Some recipes will ask you to add a heap of sugar or baking soda, which help to create the illusion of caramelized onions, but if you want the real thing on a stove top there's no real substitute for time.

In an Instant Pot (or general pressure cooker), the onion caramelizing game is completely different. The pressure allows the onions to cook at a higher temperature and caramelize without just burning. While on a stove you'd be stirring them for an hour or more, a quick five minutes on sauté mode followed by 15 to 20 minutes on high pressure will net you decent caramelized onions without all the stress and back ache.

French onion soup from scratch as a weeknight meal is a pretty tall order. Even once you've pulled out the Instant Pot to speed up your caramelized onion game, it's still going to take an hour or so to put the whole thing together. However, you can cut that time down even more whether you have a pressure cooker or not.

The big factor here is caramelizing the onions before you can get the rest of the soup ingredients in and bubbling. But nobody said that you had to caramelize those onions the same day. Caramelized onions freeze surprisingly well. You can make a bulk batch on a weekend, perhaps while prepping some for another recipe, and then freeze them. If you have them split into smaller portions then when it comes to making your favorite French onion soup recipe in a hurry, you just have to defrost and get cooking.