SETH: I'm excited to see your elevated and lengthy take on French onion soup.

REID: It's a very basic dish and simple at heart, so the process needs to be flawless.

So we're going to build a sachet.

We're going to start here with a hefty bunch of thyme that we just clipped, some parsley, some fresh bay leaves, black peppercorn.

Unique for us here, we're going to take the rinds from this very special cheese that we use.

I'm going to start to wrap up the sachet, start with cheesecloth, and kind of tuck everything in here really tight.

This is some butcher's twine.

I'm going to use that twine to tighten up the sachet.

Before we get into beef jus, the caramelized onions, I want to show you two things that make our soup really special.

Would you hand me our house-made sourdough?

SETH: Speaking of wonderful aromas.

REID: Yeah, you know, we use a starter that's over 30 years old that my wife and I brought back from California.

We go kind of thick on the croutons, right?

Because we don't want something that's just going to disappear in the soup.

Seth, would you mind handing me the bowl and the salt, please?

SETH: All right, you're going to season these croutons up?

REID: Yeah, and while I do that, we don't use the end piece here for the crouton if you'd like a snack.

All right, so just some salt, a little bit of olive oil here and into the oven to dry them out.

And Seth, no French onion soup is complete without the cheese.

Jordan, would you mind tossing Seth the cheese?

SETH: Oh my goodness, this thing weighs a ton, chef, what is this?

REID: So this is St. Malachi Reserve from the Farm at Doe Run.

They're out of Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

At Shilling, we're all about the bounty of the Mid-Atlantic, and this cheese is no exception.

This is their alpine style, akin to a Gouda or a Gruyere.

They make a regular St. Malachi.

This one spends an extra year in the caves.

We're going to take a little taste.

SETH: Ooh, I like that.

REID: It's going to be really nutty.

You're going to get notes of toffee, but really creamy.

It doesn't really have the funk that a Gruyere would have.

So this is a little more mild, but it's every bit as rich, if not richer.

SETH: All right, well I could just sit here and snack on this St. Malachi all day, but I know we have a whole soup to make.

REID: Yeah, we do.

Let's grab the sachet and dig into the two stars of this dish.

First here we have our beef jus.

Our process starts with a first boil of beef stock.

It goes 10 hours overnight and then it's drained off in the morning.

Then we refill the same pot with the same vegetables, and the same bones, and we boil it for another six hours.

When those two boils are complete, they go into the same pot and then over the course of the third day are cooked down into a jus to the perfect flavor for this soup.

SETH: So we're honoring the French onion soup with some very traditional French stock-making techniques here.

REID: Exactly.

I'm going to take this sachet and we're going to go right into our beef jus.

And remember Seth, the cheese rinds from the St. Malachi we put into the sachet.

That's the same cheese that you're enjoying right now.

SETH: Enjoying quite a bit, indeed.

REID: The cheese rinds will actually add a little bit of umami and roundness and carry the cheese profile all the way through in the completed soup.

SETH: But of course, we're here for the onions, right?

REID: That's right.

We start with 40 pounds of sweet onions out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

SETH: So, some more Mid-Atlantic produce going in here.

REID: Exactly.

SETH: And 40 pounds to get to this.

That's like the bag of spinach, you know, when you're done cooking it.

REID: Exactly.

This was two full pots of hand-cut onions cooked down into a fifth of the pot, maybe.

This is where the technique comes into play.

You can't burn them or the soup is dead, right?

SETH: You wasted 40 pounds of onions.

REID: 40 pounds and all the labor that goes into that.

So we've cooked these down really low and slow over the course of about two days... SETH: Wow.

REID: And right now there's a little bit of moisture remaining.

And so I'm going to take a little bit of flour.

It soaks up the remaining moisture from the onions, but what it will also do is to help suspend the onions in the broth.

SETH: So you're getting a little bit of onions with every spoonful of this soup.

REID: Exactly.

SETH: Brilliant.

REID: All right, Seth, we're going to skim the impurities off of the top of this stock.

The idea is to end up with a shiny almost mirror-like jus.

Now we're going to add these onions.

You can see in here, right, is that the bottom of the pot doesn't have any burn on it because we've carefully had a watchful eye on these onions the whole time.

After this comes up to a boil, we're going to leave it at a simmer for 45 minutes.

We're going to season the soup with salt and sherry vinegar.

We'll take our croutons that we made earlier from our house-made sourdough.

I'll take a few pieces of Emmenthaler because the Emmenthaler has a good moisture content to it, so we'll get that nice pull on the cheese.

And then we'll grate the St. Malachi over the top.

Then we'll place the soup up in the salamander, which will give us a really lovely gratin all the way across the top.

We'll finish it with chives, and benne seeds for presentation, and we'll be ready to enjoy it together.

SETH: All right, chef, this looks spectacular.

REID: Be mindful.

I warn guests all the time.

It's super hot.

SETH: Just a literal cauldron.

REID: It boils in the bowl.

SETH: So what's the best plan here?

REID: In a moment I'll show you how to vent it.

But we're having French onion soup, what a better pairing than champagne?

SETH: Finally, something not coming from Maryland and Pennsylvania.

REID: That's right.

They can't make champagne here, only in Champagne.

But we do get our beef from Paris, Virginia.

SETH: Of course, you do.

Sante?

REID: Ah, Sante.

God, that's so good.

SETH: That's a perfect way to start the meal.

I also want to get that perfect cheese pull.

I want this thing to be Instagram-worthy.

REID: You got to vent it, right?

So you get a little bit of some space there, and then your cheese pull.

SETH: Oh wow.

Cheese Louise.

REID: Oh, boy.

SETH: I love that.

Even on that first bite, there already were some onions floating in that stock, but the clarity of that broth, it's just fresh, but yet hearty and beefy all at the same time.

REID: Yeah.

Beef, onion, cheese.

That's it.