Dish in Focus: French onion soup gratinated with Salers, Comté and Gruyère cheese at Somm

Wolf keeps the ingredient list grounded in essentials. “We use local onions, slowly caramelised to create our own rich beef consommé. Then the base is elevated with French Comté (18 months aged), Salers (24 months aged) and Swiss Gruyère (12 months aged). We find this combination of cheeses is the perfect combination for the rich onion soup.” The process is deliberately unhurried: “First we make the consommé, [then] we roast beef bones and simmer it with mirepoix, aromatics and chicken stock overnight at a low temperature to extract as much flavour as possible.”

Then, he cooks the onions. “This process takes time, over an hour to slowly cook out the moisture then allow them to caramelise and deepen in flavour. During this process we also season and add aromatics like thyme and bay leaves to build flavour.” Wolf then deglazes with white wine, adds flour for thickness and stirs in the consommé. “[We] let that simmer,” he says, “until the flavour is where we want it. Eventually, [it’s] topped with the crouton and cheese blend and then gratinated.”

Behind the scenes, consistency at Somm’s scale depends on what Wolf calls a piece of “heavy-duty kitchen artillery” – a bratt pan. The large, flat-bottomed, gas-heated vessel allows the team to caramelise kilos of onions evenly, and use the same pan to build and simmer the soup base, eliminating transfers and hotspots that could throw off texture.

When it is time to serve, the kitchen keeps the presentation resolutely classic, ladling the soup into lion’s-head bowls, adding the crouton and the blend of cheeses and sending each to be gratinated until the surface bubbles and bronzes. Even having the bread already submerged in the soup is a detail specifically incorporated to echo the traditional experience.