Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

If you’ve got our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/beef-bouillon-cubes">beef bouillon cubes</a> on hand, you’re well on your way to making an excellent bowl of French onion soup.Most of the recipes I’ve developed to showcase the utility of these bouillon cubes have focused on convenience. Deeply flavorful, perfectly seasoned <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/beef-bouillon-red-wine-pan-sauce">pan sauces</a> in minutes; a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-instant-ramen">better-than-a-ramen-shop instant ramen</a>; near-instant <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/beef-bouillon-sipping-broth">sipping broths</a> … you get the idea. This recipe is different. It focuses on the fact that the stock you can make by reconstituting these cubes is just plain delicious, and you can use it in any application that calls for stock and get stellar results. Here, I chose to go with soupe à l&#39;oignon gratinée, one of the most comforting and warming soups in existence: caramelized onions, reduced red wine, a deeply flavorful and gelatinous beef stock, and, of course, toasted bread covered in melted Gruyère.Yes, you have to toast the bread properly, which means cutting it into croutons to make the final soup easier to navigate with a spoon. And, yes, you have to caramelize the onions properly. A lot of people have tried to hack French onion soup by taking shortcuts with the onions and playing fast and loose with the bread, but both of those tasks take time and require your attention. But once you’ve deglazed the onions with red wine and added in the bouillon, the soup’s ready to go, because you can hack the stock. While it isn’t roasted veal stock, the reconstituted bouillon has good body and is almost perfectly seasoned. All it needs is a little bump up in flavor from thyme, black pepper, and a splash of coconut aminos, and then you can decant it into crocks, top the crocks with the toasted croutons, slices of Gruyère, then shredded Gruyère, and set them under the broiler. (The sliced Gruyère forms a little cheese platform, so the melted cheese doesn’t just sink.)Sure, it’s a little less time-consuming than making a soup and having to dial in the seasoning and all that, but convenience, here, isn’t the point. This is just an excellent French onion soup, made possible by the quality of the bouillon cubes.

Hacked French Onion Soup