French onion soup is perfect for a cold winter day, or anytime you’re looking for a warm, homey meal. Nothing beats a piping hot crock of soup covered in Gruyere cheese coming to your table at a restaurant. This is our homemade version – made vegetarian!
This dish boasts a rich, savory flavor, traditionally prepared from a combination of beef broth and red wine. It’s absolutely delicious, but as vegetarians, we try to avoid all meat products, so the traditional French onion soup doesn’t work.
There are other vegetarian French onion soup recipes, but we found that they never quite produce the same meaty and hearty flavor from the beef broth. So, we decided to experiment and come up with our own recipe.
It turns out the secret ingredient to making an excellent vegetarian French onion soup is: baby bella mushrooms.
They are the perfect substitute for all the qualities that beef broth brings to the table. Baby bella mushrooms have a rich, savory flavor when cooked down and take on a nice meaty texture. When combined with the sweet caramelized onions in this recipe, you’ll be in comfort food heaven.
Ingredients
Caramelized Onions
Caramelized onions are dreamy in every which way – the sweet and rich flavor is something we wish we had in every meal. The only downfall is that they take forever to make. Thanks to the onions, plan for this recipe to take between an hour and an hour and a half.
If you like caramelized onions as much as we do, here’s an idea: make a huge batch and store them in the fridge for the rest of the week. Since they’re so time-consuming, you might as well get the most out of them and enjoy them as long as possible.
Baby Bella Mushrooms
Once you go baby bella, you never go back! They are so incredibly flavorful, rich, and meaty. Boring old white button mushrooms are a permanent thing of the past after your first recipe using baby bellas.
Other Ingredients
- brown sugar
- butter
- olive oil
- minced garlic
- soy sauce
- vegan Worcestershire sauce
- paprika
- all-purpose flour
- vegetable broth
- dried thyme
- black pepper
- salt
Instructions
- Slice your sweet onions and throw them in a large pan with butter. Mix or stir them occasionally. Sprinkle the brown sugar in once they start to turn brown. Keep simmering until onions are fully caramelized.
- Wash, dry, and slice your mushrooms. Heat up the olive oil in a large soup pot and add the mushrooms.
- Once the mushrooms have shrunk, add the garlic, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and paprika.
- After a few minutes, add the flour and mix thoroughly. The flour will thicken your mushroom mixture and provide a little extra volume.
- Once all of the flour is mixed in (it is no longer visible and there are no clumps), add the vegetable broth, dried thyme, salt, and pepper. Cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes.
- Add caramelized onions to the soup, and mix. Cover and let simmer for another 5 minutes.
- Serve with a gruyere cheese-covered toasted baguette!
Substitutions
To keep the recipe truly vegetarian, you need to use vegan Worcestershire sauce. However, if this is not important to you, feel free to use regular Worcestershire!
Equipment
- Knives
- Wooden cutting board
- Large pan
- Dutch oven (soup pot)
- Wooden spoon
- Measuring spoons
Storage
This Vegetarian French Onion Soup will keep in the fridge in an air-tight storage container for up to 5 days.
Top Tip
Baby bella mushrooms hold an incredible amount of water. When heated, the water is released, along with some of the savory flavor they hold. To keep this flavor in your soup, keep the cover on your pot while cooking down the mushrooms! You don’t want those yummy juices to evaporate.
FAQ
Baby bella mushrooms give this recipe the meatiness and savoriness that beef broth usually does.
Gruyere cheese is the traditional choice because its flavor pairs so well with the soup's savoriness. If you don't have Gruyere on hand, Swiss or mozzarella would work well as substitutes.
Vegetarian French Onion Soup
Ingredients
Method
- Melt 3 tablespoons butter over medium-high heat in a large saute pan.
- Add onions and cover for 30 minutes. Mix occasionally.
- Once onions are limp and starting to brown, mix in brown sugar. Cover and cook until onions are caramelized to your liking, mixing occasionally.
- After adding brown sugar to onions, heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Add sliced mushrooms and cover for 10 minutes. Mix occasionally.
- Once mushrooms are reduced (shrunk in half with a simmering brown liquid on the bottom of the pot), add garlic, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and paprika. Mix thoroughly, cover, and let simmer for 2-3 minutes.
- While mixing, sprinkle in flour. Mix until no flour or clumps are visible.
- Add vegetable broth, thyme, and black pepper. Cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes.
- Add caramelized onions to the soup, and mix. Cover and let simmer for another 5-10 minutes.
- Optional (but recommended!): toast baguette slices topped with Gruyere cheese until melted. Put in soup and enjoy!
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