French onion soup, chicken broth version

French onion soup is made from beef bones, the bones baked so long on high that the marrow seeps out onto the pan and burns, the black bits lifted off by deglazing. So authentic soup will have tiny black dots floating around that is not black pepper. It's awesomely rich.

Then onions, and toasted stale leftover slices of baguette as raft for Gruyère cheese. Man, those peasants sure ate well. See how they do the most with the least? Onions are right up there with stringent noxious weeds. Bones, onions, stale bread, and cheese, and they bring these ingredients to their fullest glory.

But this is Vidalia onions, with hardly any of the sulfuric onion quality. They're more like apples. They're sweet. When cooked, they get even sweeter.

Have you noticed in sautéing onions the sugar that develops at the bottom of the pan is separate from the onions. The onions are not turning brown themselves, their released sugar is, and that can be stirred and distributed throughout. This is what makes the color of the broth.

This chicken broth is homemade, from bones, as the beef version is. They too were roasted and the marrow developed to color and layers of flavor by Maillard reaction. So this time the color comes both from chicken bone marrow and darkened sugar released from the onions. Combined the two are very rich and very satisfying. Nearly so good as the authentic beef version.