6 French Onion Soup Recipes We Love

Rich, flavorful beef broth, sweet caramelized onions, and a great melting cheese that hardens around the bowl into seductively crispy bits are a must for this classic.

In this vegetarian version of classic French onion soup, blue cheese and oloroso sherry bring new layers of flavor and depth. Notes of toasted nuts and fruit compote in the sherry pair well with caramelized onions, and its briny acidity cuts through the richness of the cheese.

Hugue Dufour makes a pork broth for his French onion soup using bacon for smokiness and a pig's foot for richness. (Omit the pig's foot for a lighter broth.)

Michael Mina upgrades French onion soup with decadent truffled pecorino cheese.

For this lighter version of the classic French onion soup, freshly grated Gruyère cheese is melted over whole-grain toast and served on top of the soup.

This soup goes back, as Gwyneth Paltrow writes in My Father's Daughter, to a French restaurant called La Serre in Los Angeles where she used to eat with her father. "I've always loved the idea of French onion soup," Gwyneth says, "without actually liking the soup itself." She cooks the onions slowly with fennel and lots of garlic, makes the soup with vegetable stock and the nontraditional addition white beans, then sets the filled bowls under the broiler topped with a slice of toasted bread and a generous handful of grated cheese.