Christoph and Steffi's Food and Travel & Christoph and Steffi's Food and Travel
A bowl of thick pale dip shot through with dark brown caramelised onion, topped with chives, beside a pile of ridged crisps
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Starter American VegetarianGluten-freeNut-free vegetablesmake-aheadcomfort-food

French onion dip

Not French, and not made from soup powder. Two large onions cooked down for forty minutes until they are dark and jammy, folded through sour cream. The cooking is the recipe and there is no shortcut that gets you there.

Prep10 min
Cook45 min
Rest120 min
Servings8
Cook mode

The American party dip, made with real caramelised onions

Ingredients

Written for a 26 cm pan

Units
Temperature
Servings
8

The onions

  • 500 g onions, about 2 large, sliced thin
  • 30 g butter
  • 15 ml olive oil
  • 5 g fine salt

The dip

  • 300 g sour cream
  • 80 g mayonnaise
  • 10 ml white wine vinegar, to cut through all that sweetness
  • 5 g coarse black pepper
  • 10 g chives

Dietary labels are a guide, not a guarantee. If you have an allergy, read the ingredients yourself.

Method

  1. Slice the onions thin and put them in a wide pan with the butter, oil and salt over medium-low heat.
  2. Cook 40 minutes, stirring every five. They will sweat, then go translucent, then pale gold, then finally dark and sticky. The last ten minutes are where all the flavour arrives. If they catch, add a splash of water and scrape.
  3. Cool them completely. Warm onions will thin the sour cream and it will not thicken again.
  4. Chop them roughly, fold everything together, and rest two hours.

Notes

  • There is no fast version. Sugar does not help and heat does not help; both give you browned onions rather than caramelised ones, which taste burnt-sweet rather than deep. Forty minutes on a low flame is the price.
  • The vinegar is doing real work. Half a kilo of caramelised onion is very sweet, and without an acid the dip is cloying.
  • Nothing French about it. The name came from American soup-mix marketing in the 1950s, and the dip is usually made from a powdered sachet. This is what the sachet is imitating.
  • It keeps 5 days and is genuinely better on day two.

Ingredient substitutions

  • Sour cream can be Schmand, which is richer, or Greek yogurt, which is sharper and lighter and makes a good higher-protein version.
  • Do the onions in bulk. They freeze perfectly in a flat bag, so caramelise a kilo and keep half for next time. This turns a 45 minute dip into a 5 minute one.

Sources consulted

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Sources consulted

From Christoph Mayer

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