This is a delicious and nutritious twist on a classic dish that will add a ton of variety to your diet.  Also, it stores very well, making this an ideal choice for a multiple day meal-prep, and it can also serve as an excellent high-protein side dish for holiday meals.

In general, venison is a fantastic protein source alternative to beef or chicken because it’s low in fat calories, meaning you can eat more of them and fill fuller longer, with the bonus of giving yourself extra protein to fuel your recovery.

Bulking Tips

If you want to add calories, feel free to sub a minced beef in place of venison.  Obviously this changes the point of this recipe tremendously, but sometimes calories are more important.

Cutting Tips

If you want to cut calories, try using a lower calorie sour cream.

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The 2nd best thing about this recipe, next to it’s fantastic flavor, is that it’s incredibly simple, and next to impossible to mess up.  It’s warm, light, and full of protein and will become a staple in your meal prep recipe catalog.  If you’re cooking for two, it’s also easy to double the recipe without too much room for user error.

Quick Tips

A few words of warning: this high protein soup requires patience.  The key to a good French Onion soup is to make sure you allow your onions to caramelize long enough to develop a deep and dark richness.  If you are a beginner in the kitchen and you haven’t yet developed your confidence, it will be tempting to say “okay, this is far enough”.  Don’t be afraid to push it a little farther than what your comfortable with.  Onions are incredibly cheap and if you mess up the caramelization process, it’s really no big deal to start over since that’s really the first step in the entire process.

Make sure to use a stainless steel or copper pan to encourage a high level of browning and to cultivate the “sticky” bits that form at the bottom of a pan.

Cut Calories

You can easily modify this recipe to be even lower calorie by cutting out an extra tablespoon of butter.  That would save you 102 calories across the whole dish.  This will affect the flavor some, but it will still be delicious if you are currently on a serious cutting or other low calorie diet that limits your options.

Add Flavor

A word on cheese. We tried and experimented with several different cheese types while fine tuning this dish: Jarselburg, Swiss, and traditional Guyere.  All of them taste great, but each had slightly different nutritional values.  Ultimately, our taste tests determined that a Guyere resulted in the most flavorful dish. Because Jarselburg resulted in the lowest calories, we have featured that cheese in this dish’s recipe info, though it’d only cost you 6 extra calories to switch to Swiss or 16 extra calories to switch to Guyere.  Feel free to mix and match!

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