The French onion soup beckons, its cheesy dome covering silky, tanned onions. Crusty bread on top begs to be dunked inside the piping-hot broth. But the troubles start when attempting to charge through the mound of bubbling cheese with a spoon.
Liquid sloshes around and is, remarkably, still too hot to eat many minutes later. French onion soup is decadent, romantic and photogenic. But it usually sounds better than it tastes when the messy goblet finally cools to an appropriate temperature.
What if this beloved bowl was deconstructed, recomposed and packaged into a few wonderful bites? That’s what Vandy Vanderwarker and his team do to create the onion croquette ($7) at Maison . Most trained chefs can craft traditional onion soup, which has endured as a staple in the French canon for hundreds of years . Vanderwarker wanted to make one that defined him and the Charleston restaurant he owns with Will Love.
He did so by giving it the dim sum dumpling treatment. The one-piece plate starts with concentrated soup made using beef broth infused with trimmings leftover from butchering steaks. It’s seasoned with red wine, mixed with a little gelatin, chilled, folded with Gruyere cheese, breaded and fried.
Slice into the cheese-showered package and thick broth spills out onto a small white plate. The fried coating captures the stream, acting as the soup-soaked crouton in a traditional bowl of French onion. This method of unraveling a traditional French dish to its base components befo.
