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French onion soup is the perfect soup for fall and winter. Caramelized onions, toasted bread and melted cheese is a tasty combination hard to resist! Plus, you only need simple pantry ingredients to make it.

Serving suggestions, possible substitutions, and a complete french onion soup recipe can be found in the text below.

How to make French onion soup

Start with sauteing sliced onions with some butter. This will take some time and occasional stirring is important to avoid burning them.

The more you cook the onions the better their flavor. To help the caramelization process, I add a little bit of sugar. In about 30-40 minutes, I pour wine in and let it cook until it is reduced to almost no liquid at all.

Then you can add stock and seasoning and finish the cooking.

French onion soup calories

A serving of this soup contains about 315 calories.

Please note that the calories as well as the nutritional information provided are calculated by a third party calculator and they can differ, depending on the ingredients used. For this reason, take the number as a guide only.

Serving suggestions

With toasted cheesy bread on top and with a main of your choice (Chicken pasta casserole or meatloaf but the options are endless really).

You can also serve garlic bread on the side (instead of toasted bread) if you like.

Ingredients substitutions

White or yellow onions are the best choice here!

Butter makes the soup creamier and richer, but you can use olive oil instead if you prefer.

Cheese for French onion soup – The classic recipe uses gruyere. I prefer cheddar or mozzarella, but you can use any kind you like (preferably something that you know melts well). Other great options are gouda or edam.

Beef broth can be substituted with chicken stock or vegetable stock (to make it vegetarian). Note that the taste of this soup will also change slightly depending on the kind of broth you use.

Bread – French baguette or any kind of a “long-stick” bread works well.

Tips for making French onion soup

• If you are like me and your eyes are super sensitive to onions, I suggest you buy special goggles. They do make cutting onions easier on you because let’s be honest here – it’s a lot of onions to cut!
• French onion soup is best served with cheesy toasted bread so don’t omit this delicious topping.
• This is one of the few soup recipes I have on the blog that take a bit longer to prepare but the final result is so worth it.
• You can ladle the soup into individual oven-proof dishes, top them with toasted baguette and cheese and finish off under the broiler. At this stage, you only need to melt the cheese and the best part is that all of it will end up either in your soup or on the toast.

If you prefer quick soup recipes, you might want to try some of these:

All of these soups are easy to prepare and ready in 35 minutes or less from start to finish!