I hope this isn't too domestic but I am full of the zeal of the recent convert.
Consequent on overdue healthier and somewhat reduced eating, one of those gadgets that live in the cupboard designated for things like a George Foreman grill, panino presses, popcorn and ice-cream makers, sous vide cookers etc has come out triumphant - the Morphy Richards soup maker.
Bought for us by our son a few years ago, admired but infrequently used, I can't see it going back in for the forseeable future.
So far I have made
Smokey Bacon and Red Lentil
Carrot & Ginger
Celery
Mushroom
Broccoli & Stilton
Mock Mulligatawny (adapted from Curried Red Lentil)
Apart from the Carrot & Ginger, and only because I overdid the root ginger, they have all been excellent. Today's 'Mulligatawny' was superb.
Heinz Cream of Mushroom, one of my old stand-bys, has been knocked for six (6% or 24g being the amount of mushrooms in a 400g tin) My 1600ml. mushroom soup contained 350g, about 22%.
The Broccoli and Stilton, with 15ml. of double cream dribbled into a 400ml bowl just before serving and garnished with fresh coriander, was luxurious. Without doubt the best I've had.
I know a soup maker is unnecessary for this but on my new soupy diet it earns its keep, mainly because I needn't mess about with a blender. Press the button and it cooks whatever's in it for 21 minutes and smashes it to bits. If I want chunky then I select that and it does 28 minutes, leaving me to use the blend button if I want smaller lumps when it's finished.
Soup has replaced our quick but carb-heavy lunchtime sandwich habit, cutting calories from 300-500 to 150-300. And I enjoy it much more.
I haven't been at all sophisticated about it either. Lots of scope left. My first google hit found a site with a list of 46 basic recipes and I haven't looked beyond that yet. There's a bit of a theme - most of them start with a chopped onion, 2 cloves of garlic, and the potentially watery ones usually have a 150g spud in them to thicken them up a bit. Each 1600ml brew makes four meal-sized bowls.
I choose to soften the onions in a bit of extra virgin while I'm chopping/peeling the other stuff, if they brown a bit then so much the better.
lianaskitchen.co.uk/soup-maker-recipes/
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The mushroom soup will be even better if you stir in a couple of ounces of double cream and a dash of white wine. Best served with some crusty bread and butter and the rest of the white wine. :-)
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>> The mushroom soup will be even better if you stir in a couple of ounces
>> of double cream and a dash of white wine. Best served with some crusty bread
>> and butter and the rest of the white wine. :-)
We ate the mushroom on Saturday with some friends, I put the 15ml cream in that which definitely helped. Haven't tried wine in it.
I put 30ml in the first bowl of celery which was a bit much.
A sprinkling of fresh coriander seems to lift them a bit too. And I sprinkled some crispy fried onions on the 'mulligatawny' (all accounted for in the calorie count of course).
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SWMBO got one a year ow two back and uses it from time to time. The stuff it makes is usually pretty tasty. She often uses leftovers (not that there are many in this household!!) or bits of fresh veg etc (which we have a lot of here) which are past their usable life as a veg (e.g. droopy celery).
I think some recipes could end up being quite expensive compared to tinned soup if you went out and specifically bought all the ingredients, though Heinz is well over a quid at Tesco last time I looked for a 400mg can (unless it's on offer).
How you do you eat it without a nice bit of fresh bread or three to dip though... :-)
I'll pass her your recipe link.
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>>some recipes could end up being quite expensive compared to tinned soup...though Heinz is well over a quid at Tesco
Yes I had noticed that tinned soup inflation has been high! I think I saw it at £1.40 the other day
I've always liked the popular Heinz ones but they are classic processed food really, not much of the headline ingredient and thickened with flour.
I doubt if I've made one that's cost more than the equivalent of 60p a tin yet.
I need to work out Pea & Ham, one of my favourites.
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We have had oe for about 18 months. In winter it gets used a fair amount. However, we dont buy stuff to go in the maker, merely stuff thats left over or knocking around the fridge goes into soup.
Potato and leek for example.
The SM has earned its place on the cupboard shelf. (think it displaced the spiralizer)
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>> We have had oe for about 18 months. In winter it gets used a fair
>> amount. However, we dont buy stuff to go in the maker, merely stuff thats left
>> over or knocking around the fridge goes into soup.
Same here mainly, leftover soup. I use it quite a bit, make the odd prepared one though.
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Try adding a little asparagus to your cream of mushroom. Asparagus Cup a Soup a little at a time - to taste should do). You can't taste the asparagus but it really brings out the mushroom flavour.
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I'll try a bit of sparrowgrass, thanks.
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>> >>some recipes could end up being quite expensive compared to tinned soup...though Heinz is well
>> over a quid at Tesco
>>
>> Yes I had noticed that tinned soup inflation has been high! I think I saw
>> it at £1.40 the other day
Well under a pound.
www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=soup&sortBy=price-ascending
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Most superket soup is full of salt, and other chemicals.
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>>Most supermarket soup is full of salt, and other chemicals.
Without it, and fairly small amounts of the named ingredients, they'd probably be pretty bland. I suppose I'm to some extent rediscovering the flavour of real food where soup is concerned - my expectation as to what soup tastes like has been weighted towards the factory stuff.
I haven't added extra salt to any of mine, although some stock cubes are more loaded with it than others. My default ones for the soup are reduced salt Oxo vegetable ones, which aren't too bad.
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Try making your own stock. Vegetable and chicken easy to make and you can freeze them. Essential for Risotto and great for soups.
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>> Try making your own stock. Vegetable and chicken easy to make and you can freeze
>> them. Essential for Risotto and great for soups.
We buy a costco rotisserie chicken, (its cheap because a: its a loss leader and b: almost certainly battery reared, but none the less very tasty) and it makes three meals, and the carcass is boiled down with low salt vegetable stock inot stock and frozen in ice cube trays for soup stock.
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Your rotisserie chicken was most likely intensively reared and is technically a broiler chicken. The battery method involving cages is a system only used for egg production .
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I bow to your more extensive slave chicken knowledge.
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My uncle used to keep chickens. He taught me how to ring their necks.Sort of a pulling and twisting motion. Quite easy when you get the knack.
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A 100yd stretch of our school cross country course ran alongside the rear of a chicken processing factory. Try running 100yds without breathing in.
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>> My uncle used to keep chickens. He taught me how to ring their necks.Sort of
>> a pulling and twisting motion. Quite easy when you get the knack.
>>
My mum used to do that.
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As an impoverished student, I signed up for a night at a chicken processing factory. Baskets of live chickens were brought in, which we had to hook up by their legs on a conveyor. The next stage involved placing their heads between a couple of electrodes to stun them. This only worked on the first few before the electrodes were clogged with feathers. Then they went on to have their necks cut and bleed on the floor. From there they were par-boiled to enable the feathers to be more more easily removed by a pair of revolving rubber wheels while you held their legs (which you could often hear bones snapping). After that, they disappeared to be further processed by more experienced staff.
My shoes rotted from standing in the congealed blood on the floor, but, surprisingly, it's never put me off chicken.
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Is a rotisserie chicken one that sold cooked having been on a spit roast at the shop?
They're a common thing in France but much less so in the UK.
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the very same, buy them hot
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Also very common with the streetside vending machines in Bulgarian towns.
But they put the raw chickens on the top….
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Or £1.70 www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/268699793
(Note shrinkflation has kept some Heinz cheaper - only 300g not 400g)
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Tesco now has the ridiculous 'clubcard pricing' which is better thought of as special rip-off pricing for people without the club card and, in the case of the soup pricing, the less alert who will pick up one tin of Heinz without looking at the price. £1.70 is very poor value if between them Tesco and Kraft Heinz can afford to sell you 8 for £7. One of the reasons I partly switched to Sainsbury (who are now starting to do the same sort of thing with 'Nectar pricing'.)
I'm not naïve about this sort of thing having spent half my working life around retail, and the only way it will stop is if it is legislated, but I don't think it's cricket. I assume it sidesteps the rules around claimed price reductions.
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I hate this trend. All I want to know is the price applicable to everyone not some spurious deal applicable to "members". I agree it should be banned. I now avoid Tesco and Saisburys
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>>Clubcard and Nectar pricing…
Just wait until you get personalised pricing. The tech is coming.
Personally, I think it’s unethical.
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>> Personally, I think it’s unethical.
Like banks, you mean?
Last edited by: VxFan on Wed 24 Jan 24 at 10:41
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>> Like banks, you mean?
>>
Banks use risk based pricing. Very different to pricing a to a tin of soup.
Last edited by: VxFan on Wed 24 Jan 24 at 10:41
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>> >> Like banks, you mean?
>> >>
>>
>> Banks use risk based pricing. Very different to pricing a to a tin of soup.
Mostly for Zippy.
I was teasing of course. But only a bit. I hope you weren't offended.
I'm well out of date now but I did get involved in scorecard development a long time ago, and later in price modelling for consumer loans.
I thought much consumer lending then was immoral and I still do.
Poor people can and do buy cheaper soup, cheaper everything practically, but usually get ripped off for loans because it's hard to assess individual risk and it mostly isn't even attempted.
The worst I have come across was probably in mail order, where for a while the only criterion in the score was postcode.(Bad history e.g. CCJs were in the policy rules) Didn't matter what your individual attitude to credit or ability to pay, if you lived in the wrong place they would turn you down. And if they didn't you still paid a very large hidden credit charge because the risk assessment was so crude.
The issue is the difference between individual risk and population risk. Credit scoring and policy rules are efficient, not fair. A lender can accept very high bad rates as long as the price is right. But the majority, who make their payments, pay for the bad minority that the *lender* chooses to accept.
Of course if you follow this thinking all the way, you might conclude whole groups of people should not be eligible to borrow. Then they would borrow illegally which is worse. So it's not an easy problem to solve.
Legal consumer lenders are undoubtedly more responsible now than they were before affordability criteria became mandatory.
I'm proud to say that when I set up a small direct lending function nearly 35 years ago as a marketing test I put in strict affordability criteria. The head of risk said I could do what I wanted as long as they achieved a given score and met his policy rules. The accept rate wasn't great after the affordability check but the loans performed when analysed a year or so later. After the successful pilot it was taken over by the operations department who also ran risk and immediately took out the affordability checks and relied solely on the scorecard and rules I had been using as a filter.
The bad rate went up, a lot, and the operation subsequently closed. You could say the operation was a success but the patient died. The head of risk was in thrall to the scorecard I think because at the time FICO were charging £1m a go for them. The scorecard of course had not been developed on the right population because there was no history to do it with. If I said that a risk director didn't understand why the bad rates in the scorecard table wouldn't work for a different set of applicants and a a different type of loan you probably wouldn't believe me, but it's true.
I'm happier with soup.
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>> I'm happier with soup.
Bit like project managing a bid for a contract. The risk assessment manager puts a block on it, the sales team appeal to the finance director, project goes ahead, project manager gets in it place, and the service manager gets the blame when it makes no money due to the extra cost mitigating and managing out the risk that came true
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Around 1990 or so I went on a LISP AI training course to support a Griffin logo'd banking customer who was looking at using AI to process consumer loan applications. Applicant postodes were one of the startup seeds.
Brilliant training course - two weeks in Stuttgart during Volksfest.
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Was AI a thing back then or are we recycling TLAs?
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Not a recycled TLA. AI and machine learning has been around for a long time.
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>> Was AI a thing back then or are we recycling TLAs?
>>
TLA was the project plan, AI was the result, Something completely different and a bit short.
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>> Or £1.70 www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/268699793
5 for £5 with Clubcard, or 8 for £7.
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So getting on for a 100% mark up for customers who haven't signed up to their marketing/data stealing scheme.
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Well over 20 years ago, looking back, we went on a skiing holiday to Les Deux Alpes. Staying in a catered chalet. The staff were are a couple of young lads in maybe their early 20s.
Their soup was to die for. Apparently an awful lot of butter went into the mix.
So probably my comment about 'to die for' wasn't far off the truth. :). We all survived.
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>> So getting on for a 100% mark up for customers who haven't signed up to
>> their marketing/data stealing scheme.
>>
I know, I know. It's quite scandalous, isn't it?
All day, every day, I am fighting off people who have got hold of my data from my Tesco Clubcard and are bleeding me white, in so many different ways. I tell you, I am at my wits end.
Carey Street is beckoning - now I will let you into a little secret. Carey Street wasn't so bad when there was a Wetherspoons at the end, on the corner with Chancery Lane, but that's closed, so there is no little hidden benefit of going to Carey Street - good food and well kept beers all at very reasonable prices.
Seriously - what am I to do?
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>I know, I know. It's quite scandalous, isn't it?
There was a court case that caused a bit of a stir when we lived in Austin.
A woman had been injured after slipping on something on the floor in a supermarket aisle. She tried to recover her medical bills and lost income from them but the supermarket denied any responsibility and the case ended up in court.
In court, the company's lawyers produced the purchase history from her loyalty card and tried to imply that she had an alcohol problem because she sometimes bought wine there.
They lost the case and, I'm guessing, most of their customers after the publicity they received.
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>> >I know, I know. It's quite scandalous, isn't it?
>>
>> There was a court case that caused a bit of a stir when we lived
>> in Austin.
>>
>> A woman had been injured after slipping on something on the floor in a supermarket
>> aisle. She tried to recover her medical bills and lost income from them but….
Scummy supermarket and scummy lawyers!
Would using the data like that be legal in the UK, what with data protection etc?
I recall a journalist here asked Tesco (Dunnhumby), for a copy of their data on her and it ran to over 90 pages. Annoyingly I cant find the article on my phone (I am ion a remote hotel and can only get a weak signal and their WiFi is down).
Last year Dunnhumby’s turnover was £267m - not bad for processing data - that’s over a quarter of a billion pounds - sounds more like that. Their profit was £37 million after tax. They employ 795 staff - I wonder what they all do?
Tesco Holdings Ltd own 75% of its shares.
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Cullen skink £3.70/400g. My favourite, but I can usually only get it around Burns night.
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>> Cullen skink £3.70/400g. My favourite, but I can usually only get it around Burns night.
Is that the Baxters one?
I also had a chowder recently which was very similar to the Cullen Skink.
The variation in availability of there products is weird. I like the Royal Game but there are weeks at a time when it's not in Tesco (but is in Sainsbury).
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I too am a convert. My go to recipe is Indian Tomato soup, but with 2x 400 gms of tinned toms, a carrot for sweetness, 1 onion for? and significantly more chilli flakes and garum masala than any published recipe. Adding double cream turns into a luxury , and leftover naan bread when available.
Brocolli and stilton comes a close second, but need more stilton tha what is good for me.
I enjoy french onion soup, but have yet to find a way of making it in the soup maker.
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Used my 'soup maker' last night - a near 50 year old Prestige pressure cooker (if making a lot I have to up to the more modern Jam pan!), and a probably over 40 year old Kenwood Chef liquidiser. OK I had to wash up the pan as well as the liquidiser! Not sure that justifies the purchase of another gadget.... do need to overhaul the Kenwood though, the gearbox is a bit noisy!
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>> I enjoy french onion soup, but have yet to find a way of making it
>> in the soup maker.
Roast my onion in the air fryer first, then into the soup maker. And roast garlic before it goes in too.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 23 Jan 24 at 14:14
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We normally make a traditional big pot of soup on a Sunday or Monday that does lunches and first courses for the rest of the week. Soup stays in pot all week and slowly gets thicker and occasionally with a skin over it. Yummy!
Anyway missus quite fancies getting a soup maker to encourage us to maybe make different soups over the course of the week so what models have you guys got and what should I be looking out for when choosing one?
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I don't ever recall eating (or drinking) soup in my life.
Am I the only one on here?
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>> Am I the only one on here?
>>
Almost certainly. You must have declined it many times?
What do you float your little bread ducks on?
When I have got on top of a couple of other jobs, this week's mission is creating Brown Windsor Soup. Starting with a bit of research, because I can't say with any certainty what it is. It appeared on the menu of a cafe next to the Co-op when I was a child. I never asked, I must have assumed it was just one of those grown up things that needn't concern me.
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>> When I have got on top of a couple of other jobs, this week's mission
>> is creating Brown Windsor Soup. Starting with a bit of research, because I can't say
>> with any certainty what it is.
Keep us posted. I too remember it, probably on hotel menus, when I was a kid and have wondered what it was.
I'd say it was Oxtail's cousin but I might be way off beam.
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Sort of thick beef and vegetable soup. More like a stew than a soup. Very nutritious but a bit heavy for modern tastes probably
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>> Sort of thick beef and vegetable soup. More like a stew than a soup. Very
>> nutritious but a bit heavy for modern tastes probably
Wikipedia suggests it was a product that went down in the world over time....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_soup
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>> Almost certainly. You must have declined it many times?
Yes indeed. I'm not a fan of hot drinks in general though, although I might have a cup of tea on a rare occasion.
Soup with lumpy bits in it (ingredients) puts me off as well though. I'm also the same with orange juice with added bits.
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>> soups over the course of the week so what models have you guys got and
>> what should I be looking out for when choosing one?
We have the www.morphyrichards.co.uk/products/compact-soup-maker
Chosen because it is quick (30 mins max to make soup from scratch), simple, and does not require too much cupboard space. Easy to clean.
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 30 Jan 24 at 10:17
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Linky not working for me?
You got the model number?
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>> Linky not working for me?
>> You got the model number?
>>
It's because he put a full stop and the end of the link.
You would think he would know better...
www.morphyrichards.co.uk/products/compact-soup-maker
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>> Linky not working for me?
It should now. The full stop at the end was the problem.
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Ours is the full size version of the Morphy which makes 1300-1600ml. Model 48822.
I usually make them up to 1600 which gives us 4 decent bowls, enough for a lunch.
The main option you could opt for, which it hasn't got, is saute. Most of the recipes I make entail softening/browning an onion in a bit of EVOO which I find convenient to do in a small frying pan. I gather the saute option with soup makers can be hit and miss as to whether it burns or not.
Last edited by: Manatee on Mon 29 Jan 24 at 18:03
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>> The main option you could opt for, which it hasn't got, is saute.
to saute is good, to roast is better. Mondays soup, using the left over Sunday roasted veg, makes perfect sense
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Two days ago, Sunday, my walking group provided soup for 350 hungry walkers & runners.
Our annual ‘That’s Lyth’ 25 mile route, from Abbott Hall social centre in Kendal. £1200 food collection at Asda the previous day, distributed snacks around 3 village hall check points, then on the day I stirred 4 large soup tureens for several hours.
We used the 600ml clear plastic container type soups ( 2 for £3). Think we had 8 different soups for variety....some of them were lovely.
I like soup. CBA making my own.
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This soup is my new favourite.
lianaskitchen.co.uk/moroccan-chickpea-soup/
I just put 2tsp of ras-el-hanout in instead of the four specified spices.
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Serendipity and the Soup Maker - CGNorwich
