French Onion Meatloaf

French Onion Meatloaf is the cozy, savory dinner. This recipe takes classic meatloaf and gives it a delicious twist with French onion soup mix, crunchy French-fried onions, and a sweet-tangy ketchup glaze that caramelizes beautifully as it bakes. It’s hearty, flavorful, and so easy to make with ingredients you probably already have in your pantry!

Love More Dinner Ideas? Try My Salisbury Steak with Mushroom Gravy or this Hamburger Rice Casserole next.

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

The French onion flavor is bold and comforting, reminding me of those cold evenings when only something warm and satisfying will do. The sour cream keeps everything incredibly moist, and that caramelized ketchup and brown sugar glaze on the bottom? Pure magic when you flip it over to serve. Plus, it’s made with simple ingredients and comes together in one bowl.

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Ingredient List

For the Meatloaf:

• Cooking spray
• 1½ pounds ground beef
• ¾ cup French-fried onions
• ¾ cup bread crumbs
• 2 large eggs
• ½ cup sour cream
• ¼ cup milk
• 1 (1-ounce) package French onion soup mix
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 1½ teaspoons salt
• ¼ teaspoon cracked black pepper
• ¼ teaspoon ground ginger

For the Glaze:

• ½ cup ketchup
• ½ cup brown sugar

Yields: One 9×5-inch loaf, about 8 servings

Why These Ingredients Work

That packet of French onion soup mix is basically doing all your work for you. It’s got dried onions, beef bouillon, salt, onion powder, probably garlic, maybe some herbs—I don’t actually know everything in there but it’s a lot. My mom used to dump it in pot roast when I was growing up and I always wondered why her pot roast tasted amazing compared to my friend’s moms who made it from scratch with individual spices. Turns out that soup mix is the secret! Someone at Lipton or whatever company makes it figured out the perfect ratios already so we don’t have to.

Those French-fried onions are what everyone always asks me about when they eat this. People cannot figure out how some stay crunchy after baking for so long. Honestly I don’t know either! Some kind of oil coating maybe? But half of them stay surprisingly crispy creating these awesome texture moments, while the other half soften completely and distribute onion flavor everywhere. Best of both worlds happening in one meatloaf.

That glaze is pure nostalgia for me. Ketchup and brown sugar together sounds almost too simple to work, but when the sugar caramelizes in the oven it transforms into this glossy, sticky, sweet-tangy coating. Tastes exactly like really good homemade barbecue sauce mixed with the ketchup glaze.

Essential Tools and Equipment

• 9×5-inch loaf pan
• Large mixing bowl
• Measuring cups and spoons
• Cooking spray
• Meat thermometer (seriously, get one if you don’t have it!)
• Spatula or large spoon for mixing

How To Make French Onion Meatloaf

Step 1: Preheat and Prepare Your Pan

Turn your oven to 350°F right away so it’s heating up while you do everything else. Grab your loaf pan and spray it down really generously with cooking spray. I use way more than probably necessary because I’m super paranoid about food sticking after this one time years ago when my entire meatloaf stuck to the pan and came out in chunks. Traumatic! Then spread your ketchup and brown sugar right on the bottom of the pan in as even a layer as you can. Yeah this feels completely wrong and backwards! You’re supposed to brush glaze on top of things, not put it on the bottom under raw meat. Just go with it. When you flip the finished meatloaf over later, that glaze is gonna be all caramelized and shiny and gorgeous on top where everyone can see it.

Step 2: Mix Your Meatloaf Mixture

Get out your biggest mixing bowl—you’ll need the room—and dump in everything else. Ground beef, those fried onions, bread crumbs, both eggs, sour cream, milk, that soup mix packet, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and the ginger. Now here’s the part where some people get squeamish but you really gotta just go for it—use your hands to mix everything together. Spoons and forks take forever and you never get ingredients properly combined. Yeah your hands get all gross and meaty, but just wash them after! Squish everything around until you stop seeing white streaks from the sour cream and everything looks pretty uniform throughout.

Step 3: Shape and Transfer to Pan

Use your hands to form the meat mixture into something that looks vaguely loaf-shaped, then drop it right on top of that ketchup-sugar layer you put in the pan earlier. Press it down a bit with your hands so it’s actually touching the glaze underneath and fills out the pan shape relatively evenly. Doesn’t need to look perfect or professional! I used to waste like ten minutes trying to smooth the top and make it look all fancy, until my husband pointed out that literally nobody sees it until after it’s baked and sliced anyway. Total waste of time! It’s gonna look incredible after baking regardless of what you do now.

Step 4: Bake Until Perfect

Put it in your preheated oven and set a timer for one hour. I personally always start checking around the 50-minute mark because my oven is super moody and runs hot on random days for no reason I can figure out. You want the center to not be pink anymore when you peek at it—that’s your visual cue. If you have a meat thermometer, which you really truly should buy if you don’t own one yet, stick it right in the thickest center part. You’re looking for 160°F showing on the display. That’s the magic safe temperature for ground beef being fully cooked all the way through.

Step 5: Rest and Serve

This is the part that requires serious patience and willpower—you gotta let it sit in the pan for a full 5 minutes minimum after taking it out of the oven. I know it smells absolutely incredible and you’re starving and everyone’s hovering around the kitchen asking when dinner’s ready. Set another timer if you need to, because I guarantee you’ll forget otherwise and start cutting too soon. That resting period is when everything firms up and reabsorbs some juices so your slices actually hold together properly instead of crumbling into chunks.

You Must Know

Those 5 minutes of resting time are absolutely mandatory! This is not a suggestion or a “nice if you have time” kind of thing—it’s the actual difference between perfect slices and a disappointing crumbly pile. I cannot emphasize this enough because I’m naturally really impatient, especially when I’m hungry, so I’ve learned this particular lesson the hard way many, many times over the past year. Even my husband knows to set a timer now specifically to physically stop me from cutting too early, because he got tired of meatloaf that fell apart!

Personal Secret: Before I add those French-fried onions to my meat mixture, I dump them into a gallon-size zip-top plastic bag and whack them several times with my rolling pin. Not completely pulverizing them into dust or tiny crumbs, just breaking up some of the bigger pieces so you have varied sizes. This way you end up with some nice crunchy chunks that create those awesome texture surprises in certain bites, but you also get smaller pieces that spread around everywhere and distribute that onion flavor into every single part of the loaf instead of just random concentrated spots wherever the big whole pieces happened to land.

Pro Tips & Cooking Hacks

• Keep all your ingredients cold until the last second: Made this mistake one time when I was rushing around trying to get dinner started while also helping my daughter with her science homework. Left the eggs and sour cream sitting out on the counter for probably thirty or forty minutes while I was distracted with other stuff. By the time I actually started mixing everything together, those ingredients had warmed up to room temperature and my whole meat mixture turned really soft and liquidy and almost impossible to shape into a loaf. Had to dump in a bunch of extra bread crumbs to firm it back up enough to work with. Now I pull everything straight from the refrigerator right when I’m actually ready to use it. Keeping ingredients cold keeps the mixture firm and easy to handle without it getting all mushy.
• Meat thermometer legitimately changed my entire cooking life: I resisted buying one for probably ten years because I thought I should be able to tell when meat was done by how it looked or how it felt when I poked it, like some experienced chef on TV. Pride thing I guess? But I made so many completely dried-out dinners from overcooking things out of paranoia, and also a few genuinely scary undercooked situations. Finally grabbed a cheap digital thermometer from the cooking aisle at Target for like eight dollars, and it changed everything overnight. Just stick it in, wait three seconds for the number, done. No more guessing, no more anxiety, no more ruined expensive meat. Worth every single penny of that purchase and I wish I’d done it years earlier!
• Parchment paper trick makes life easier: Cut two long strips of regular parchment paper and lay them in your loaf pan in a cross pattern before you add the glaze, making sure you leave enough hanging over all the edges that you can grab them later like handles. When the meatloaf’s done baking and resting, you just lift the whole entire thing straight up and out using those paper strips as handles. So much easier than trying to flip it or scoop it out with spatulas, and way less likely to fall apart or stick. Plus your pan is dramatically cleaner afterward! Saw this trick on some random cooking video YouTube recommended to me and I felt so dumb for not thinking of it myself after struggling for years.
• Mini muffin tin versions are huge hit with kids: Did this one time when my son had three friends sleeping over and they needed dinner. Filled up a 12-cup muffin tin about three-quarters full in each cup, put a little blob of that glaze on top of each one, baked them for only 25-30 minutes instead of a full hour. The boys absolutely lost their minds over having their own personal individual mini meatloaves. Way cuter presentation, cooks way faster which is great when you’ve got hungry teenagers wandering around your kitchen, and they demolished every single one so I know for sure they actually liked them! Do this now whenever we have extra kids over.

Flavor Variations & Suggestions

• Mix different types of meat together: Sometimes my grocery store has ground pork on sale and beef is expensive that week, so I’ll grab pork instead and do like one pound of beef mixed with half a pound of pork. The pork fat makes everything way juicier and richer tasting. My dad does half beef and half Italian sausage at his house and swears up and down it’s the best version he’s ever had, but I personally haven’t tried that yet because my kids are super picky about sausage texture for some reason. Maybe when they’re older and less annoying about food!
• Add more cheese because why wouldn’t you: Throw in about half a cup of shredded Gruyere or Swiss cheese to really play up that whole French onion soup angle. My twelve-year-old daughter is completely obsessed with cheese on literally everything she eats, so she demands this cheesy version every single time now. Makes it even richer and more savory if that’s even possible. The cheese melts into everything and creates these little pockets of gooey goodness. So good!
• Fresh herbs from your garden if you’re fancy: I’ve got thyme and parsley growing in pots on my back porch—honestly they basically take care of themselves, I barely water them—so when I actually remember to go snip some before I start cooking, I’ll chop up maybe two tablespoons worth and mix it in with everything else. Doesn’t dramatically transform the flavor or anything, but it adds this fresher, slightly fancier taste. Like something you’d order at a nicer restaurant instead of just throwing together on a random Wednesday night. Makes me feel accomplished even though it took zero extra effort!
• Add some heat if you like spicy: My brother dumps in red pepper flakes every single time he makes this at his place and says it’s absolutely incredible. He’s not trying to make it actually spicy-hot, just adding some background warmth and depth. I haven’t personally done it myself yet because my kids will complain loudly if there’s even the tiniest bit of heat in their dinner, but next time we’re having just adults over I’m definitely trying it. Sounds really good actually!
• BBQ sauce version when you’re out of ketchup: Completely ran out of ketchup one night—didn’t even have those little squeeze packets from fast food restaurants stashed in my junk drawer—so I just used BBQ sauce for the glaze instead and hoped it would work. My husband actually said he preferred that version! Now I switch back and forth between ketchup and BBQ sauce depending on what I’m in the mood for and what I’ve got in the fridge. Both versions are equally delicious, just slightly different flavor profiles. Can’t go wrong either way!

Make-Ahead Options

This is hands-down my absolute favorite meal prep recipe when I know I’ve got an insane busy week coming up. Sunday afternoon when I actually have some free time and energy to cook, I’ll mix absolutely everything together, shape it into the loaf pan with the glaze spread on the bottom, then wrap the entire pan super tight with plastic wrap and stick it in the refrigerator. Come Tuesday or Wednesday evening when I’m completely exhausted from work and the kids are hangry and whining about when dinner will be ready, I just pull it out of the fridge, let it sit on the counter for maybe 15 minutes while the oven’s preheating, then bake it exactly like normal.

You can also fully bake it completely on Sunday, let it cool all the way down, then keep it covered in the refrigerator for up to 4 days and just reheat individual portions throughout the week. We actually do this sometimes and the kids make meatloaf sandwiches for lunch—thick slices on toasted bread with mayo, lettuce, maybe some sliced tomato if we have it. So incredibly good! Honestly I think it tastes even better the next day or two after all the flavors have been sitting together and marinating.

Recipe Notes & Baker’s Tips

People always give me the weirdest looks when I explain that I mix crunchy fried onions directly into the raw meat mixture before baking. They think I mean sprinkling them on top at the very end as garnish, like you do with green bean casserole at Thanksgiving. Nope! Right into the mixture raw, so they’re baking inside the actual meatloaf for an entire hour. Sounds insane when you first hear it, I totally get that reaction because I had the same thought initially!

But here’s what happens—some of those onion pieces somehow stay surprisingly crunchy even after baking that long, creating these really cool texture surprises in random bites. And other pieces completely soften up and get melty and spread their onion flavor throughout the entire loaf. So you’re getting totally different textures and flavor intensities in different bites, which keeps things way more interesting than standard boring same-texture-throughout regular meatloaf. That’s genuinely what makes this recipe special and different instead of just another forgettable meatloaf. If you skip the fried onions completely, it’ll still taste pretty good because of that soup mix seasoning everything, but you’re really missing out on what makes everyone obsessed and asking you for the recipe!

That glaze just sitting there on the pan bottom before you add the raw meat might look really thick or weird or just wrong somehow. Sometimes I drizzle maybe a tablespoon of water over it and swish it around gently to thin it out slightly. But honestly even if you don’t bother doing that, once everything heats up properly in the oven it melts and spreads and caramelizes into perfection anyway. I’ve done it both ways dozens of times at this point and genuinely can’t tell much difference in the final result, so don’t stress about it too much!

The ginger is that mystery ingredient everyone always asks me about but absolutely nobody ever correctly identifies. My next-door neighbor ate this three separate times over the course of like two months before she finally asked me what made it taste so different and special compared to regular standard meatloaf. When I told her one of the ingredients was ground ginger she literally laughed out loud and said I was lying to her! She genuinely thought it would taste obviously like gingerbread cookies or ginger ale or ginger candy, something clearly identifiable as ginger-flavored. But that’s exactly why it works so well—it’s just this really subtle warmth happening in the background that makes all the other flavors pop and stand out more, without being identifiable on its own. Don’t leave it out thinking it won’t matter much. It absolutely matters!

Serving Suggestions

At my house this meatloaf always shows up on the table alongside mashed potatoes because that’s literally the only side dish all three of my children will eat without constant complaining. I make them the really garlicky, super buttery kind with way too much heavy cream and sour cream, exactly the way my kids love them. Usually also nuke some frozen green beans in the microwave for like four minutes so there’s at least one actual vegetable on everyone’s plate and I can feel slightly less guilty about nutrition. When I’m actually putting in effort or we have company coming over for dinner, I’ll make my mom’s roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon recipe, or those honey-glazed carrots my grandmother used to make for literally every single holiday dinner when I was growing up.

But real talk, most regular weeknights when everyone’s tired? It’s just bagged Caesar salad from Costco with bottled dressing because I’m exhausted and that’s genuinely good enough! Nobody’s complaining and we’re all fed. That’s a win in my book.

If my mother-in-law’s coming to visit or I’m trying to impress someone for whatever reason, I’ll carefully flip the finished meatloaf out onto my nice white serving platter so that gorgeous caramelized glaze is displayed on top where everyone can see it, sprinkle some extra fried onions over the whole thing, throw on some roughly chopped fresh parsley for that pop of green color. Makes it look like I spent hours and hours slaving away in the kitchen when this is actually legitimately one of my easiest dinners to throw together.

How to Store Your French Onion Meatloaf

Refrigerator: Any leftover slices go into whatever random container I happen to have available in my cabinet—usually those old Chinese takeout containers I’ve been reusing forever, or mismatched Tupperware with lids that barely fit. Lasts 4 days easily in the fridge, sometimes even 5 if I’m being honest. Sometimes I’ll wrap up individual slices separately in aluminum foil so my husband can just grab one for his lunch without me having to actually pack it for him at like 6am when I’m barely awake and definitely not functional yet.

Freezer: This freezes really really well! I wrap individual slices in plastic wrap first, then throw them all together in one big freezer bag. Always write the date on it with a Sharpie marker or else you’ll totally forget and discover mystery frozen meat six months later wondering what it is. Supposedly keeps for 3 months frozen, though ours honestly never lasts anywhere near that long because someone always raids the freezer when they’re hungry and lazy about cooking. Thaw it overnight in the fridge before reheating, or the middle will be weird and icy while the outside’s hot.

Reheating: Regular microwave works totally fine for reheating single slices—just heat for maybe a minute or two until it’s hot all the way through the middle. For reheating bigger portions I cover them with aluminum foil and warm them up in a 325°F oven for probably 15-20 minutes. That foil covering is really important or else the outside gets all dried out and crusty while the inside’s still cold! Learned that specific lesson the hard way unfortunately.

Allergy Information

Contains: Eggs, dairy (sour cream, milk), wheat (bread crumbs)

Substitutions:

• Gluten-free: Just buy gluten-free bread crumbs from the store—they sell them now in most regular grocery stores—or smash up some gluten-free crackers into crumbs. My friend Sarah who has celiac disease makes this constantly using gluten-free substitutions and she swears you legitimately cannot tell any difference whatsoever in taste or texture.
• Dairy-free: Replace the sour cream with one of those dairy-free yogurts they make now—coconut milk or almond milk based ones. And use whatever non-dairy milk you normally buy for cereal or coffee—almond milk, oat milk, soy milk, whatever you’ve got.
• Egg-free: Haven’t personally tried this variation myself so I can’t vouch for results, but my cousin who’s been vegan for like five years says you can mix ground flaxseed with water to make these things called flax eggs, or you can buy that egg replacer powder made by Bob’s Red Mill from the baking section. She makes tons of baked goods using those substitutes and swears they work great, but I’ve never done it myself so I genuinely don’t know!

Questions I Get Asked A Lot

My meatloaf totally fell apart when I sliced it—what went wrong?

Okay so either you didn’t let it rest for those crucial 5 minutes and got way too excited and impatient like I used to always do, or your eggs didn’t get mixed in thoroughly enough at the very beginning when you were combining everything. Those eggs are literally the glue ingredient holding everything together into an actual loaf shape instead of just loose crumbly meat falling apart everywhere. Also double-check that you’re using a really sharp knife and kind of gently sawing through it instead of just pressing straight down hard with a dull knife.

Can I use a different type of ground meat instead of beef?

Absolutely yes! Ground turkey or ground chicken work fine if that’s what you happen to have on hand, or if you’re trying to eat healthier and cut down on red meat. Just be aware they’re way way leaner than ground beef so you should probably add an extra spoonful or two of sour cream or else your finished meatloaf might come out somewhat dry and disappointing.

The glaze burned really badly on the bottom—how do I prevent that?

Your oven definitely runs hot like mine does! Try lowering the temperature to 325°F instead of the full 350°F, and start checking for doneness way earlier around 50 minutes instead of waiting the full hour. Also if that ketchup-sugar mixture looks super thick and paste-like when you first spread it in the pan, add a small splash of water to thin it out somewhat.

💬 Tried this recipe? Leave a comment and rating below! I’d love to hear how your French Onion Meatloaf turned out!