Australian Onion Soup

You have heard of French Onion Soup and you may have heard of Jamie Oliver’s English Onion Soup (if you’re a fan or a cookbook-buying fanatic) but I would like to introduce you to the Australian Onion Soup.

So how did this come about? Josh’s wind band was organising a sausage sizzle fund raising one day and he brought home the leftovers – supermarket sausages and onions. What am I to do with them?

Ah ha! Sausage-onion-soup of course. If the French can top off their onion soup with cheesy toast, we can top it off with barbecued snags, can’t we?

Recipe serves 3-4 people.

Ingredients – Soup

• 5-6 medium-sized onions, thinly sliced (about 1.5kg)
• A chunk of butter, about 40g
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 4 fresh sage leaves
• 1 sprig fresh thyme
• 1 fresh bay leaf
• 3 cups meat stock of your choice (I use Continental beef Stock Pot this time)
• 2 tbsp port (you can also use wine or brandy or both)
• salt, pepper, sugar to taste

Ingredient – Grilled Sausages

• 3 to 8 generic supermarket beef sausages (depends how many sausages you would like to serve per person, sometimes I do one, sometimes two)

Steps

Heat oil and butter in a non-stick frying pan. Fry sliced onions on low heat and keep stirring. You have to be fairly patient unfortunately.

Wait until it goes all soft and browned and begins to fall apart – around 20-30 minutes, add sage, thyme and bay leaf. This does also depend if you like a bit of texture in your onion soup. I do like mine to not completely fall apart so I don’t wait until it goes all mushy like many recipes do. See what you like.

Add stock and port (or wine or brandy) – at this point I added the stock paste into my onion mixture and followed by attempting to pour hot water into my brand new Pyrex measuring cup whose bottom immediately fell out on upon contact with hot water. And naturally I had to start over. Boy was I pissed off! Luckily I didn’t have the cup over my feet or near my child and I just lost of a pot of cooked onions rather than getting scalded by hot water and cut by broken glass.

Target (retailer) didn’t bother to respond to my email enquiry and the guy who answered the phone at Pyrex basically pissed me off too much so I decided to let it go and never buy another Pyrex product again. Replaced it by a cheap no-brand tempered glass measuring cup and it has worked a treat since. Bye Pyrex. Nice knowing you. Not.

Anyway! Back to the recipe. Gently simmer the soup for another twenty minutes or so and season to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. A pinch at a time, especially sugar.

Meanwhile, place the sausages under the grill on low heat and grill for about 10 minutes or until juicy and browned all over. Don’t forget to keep turning every few minutes. Serve the grilled snags with your onion soup.

Yum yum.