Crockpot French Onion Soup

Leslie, my roommate, and I have been saying that we need a crockpot. So, we finally got one! We searched through Pinterest and found a French Onion Soup from Cookie Monster Cooking. I've never been a fan of french onion soup, but Leslie is, so I figured I would try it out. The process takes quite some time. So if you have the day free, I'd try this out. It is worth the time, the onions caramelize so well. This recipe also makes a large amount of soup. We ended up freezing the majority of the soup.
We weren't able to follow the directions completely since we didn't have oven-safe bowl, so the way I executed the end is a little different. If you have an oven-safe bowl, I would go check out the original recipe. 

- I forgot to take a picture, so here is the picture from where I got the recipe-

Ingredients

6 tbs unsalted butter, cut into pieces
4 large yellow onions, thinly sliced
8 cups low sodium beef broth
1 bay leaf
2 cloves garlic, minced
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
Parmesan cheese
Loaf of french bread
freshly shredded gruyere cheese
(we used plain swiss cheese)

Directions

Crockpot: high

Add in the butter chunks and then put on the cover. 

Once the butter is melted, add in the sliced onions. 

Mix to combine. Put on the cover and let cook for about 1 hour.

After the first hour, give the onions a good stir. 

Place a double layer of paper towels under the lid (this will help absorb some of the moisture - you’ll want to replace this layer about 2 to 3 times during the cooking process). 

Continue to cook on high for about 5 to 6 additional hours, 

stirring the onions about every 35 to 45 minutes.

You want the onions to be a caramel color. 

Towards the end, you may need to stir them more often so you don’t burn them

Discard the paper towels. Turn down the crockpot to low. 

Add in the broth, bay leaf, garlic, salt and pepper. 

Cover and cook for 1 hour. 

Discard the bay leaf and then taste and adjust with additional salt/pepper if needed.

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This is where you would use the oven safe bowls, but since we don't have any here is what we did:

 Put the oven on broil.

As the oven is heating up:

 cut the loaf in half, add butter, parmesan cheese, and gruyere cheese (or swiss)

heat for about a minute, keep checking on the bread so it doesn't burn. 

-Instead of placing cubes of bread in the soup, I dipped the bread into the soup. Just as delicious-

TATER RATER

Suggestions: Depending on your broth, you’ll need to adjust the amount of salt to your taste, so just taste and adjust as needed. You can always add more salt later, so start with a lower amount and go from there. 

I love cheese, so I also sprinkled parmesan cheese into the soup. Highly recommended