Slow Cooker French Onion Soup

Name: Slow Cooker French Onion Soup
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 20 h 22 min
Total time: 20 h 32 min
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 3 pounds yellow onions, peeled and sliced; 2 tablespoons unsalted butter; 2 tablespoons olive oil; 1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste; Freshly ground black pepper; 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar; 10 cups beef bone broth or homemade beef bone broth or low sodium beef broth; 3 tablespoons Sherry, optional; 6 baguette slices for each bowl; 1 1/3 to 2 cups grated or shaved Gruyere cheese; Chopped parsley for garnishing

posted by Sharon Chen on Jun 21, 2017 (updated Aug 21, 2020) 13 comments »

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Let this healthy, soothing slow cooker French onion soup cook itself while you’re busy with other things. Make it with bone broth for a boost of collagen.

Let this healthy, soothing slow cooker French onion soup cook itself while you’re busy with other things. Make it with bone broth for a boost of collagen.

When you’re in the mood for some warm and savory comfort food, this slow cooker French onion soup is a great choice as it’s a classic and amazingly delicious. This is a long, slow dish to cook that adds a nice aroma to your home. Despite the length of time, this is an easy recipe with mostly hands-off time while the slow cooker does the work.

This recipe only takes 10 minutes to prep and then you let it cook in the slow cooker. A good French onion soup starts with caramelized onions. If you do it on the stove, this single step will take around 40 minutes. I don’t have the patience for that. So a better way of cooking the onion, in my opinion, is to caramelize it in a slow cooker, completely hands off.

Slow Cooker French Onion Soup - caramelized onions

You start with putting chopped onions in a slow cooker, add butter and olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and then let it cook on low for 12 hours. Do it at night before you go to sleep.

The next day, you simply pour some broth over the onion, add balsamic vinegar and Sherry (which is optional) in the slow cooker and let the soup cook when you are at work.

Let this healthy, soothing slow cooker French onion soup cook itself while you’re busy with other things. Make it with bone broth for a boost of collagen.

In the end, when you get home from work, you take over by ladling the soup into oven-safe bowls, adding a piece of good baguette and Gruyere cheese to each bowl, and then cooking it in the oven.

I love how this slow cooker French onion soup is mostly hands-off and the way the flavors fuse together over such a long time. If you don’t have the patience to cook French onion soup in a traditional way, I think you are going to love this slow cooker version. Try it and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Let this healthy, soothing slow cooker French onion soup cook itself while you’re busy with other things. Make it with bone broth for a boost of collagen.