Electric soup maker advice

Originally Posted by Osem

How about some samples?

Sorry, we ate it all.

First batch, carrot and coriander, went down very very well. My initial impressions of the machine are that, if you have a good recipe and you stick to it, the results are phenomenally good, with almost no effort whatsoever. The Morphy Richards produces smooth soup in 21 minutes and I took an extra 10 minutes on top of that to finely chop the veg.

The only drawback is that adjusting the seasoning and flavour once the batch is cooked is just slightly more fiddly, as you need to lift the top off it, drop things into the cooker and then reassemble, and select the manual blend option to mix it in. I didn't have a c&c recipe so I used the basic veg soup recipe in the instruction manual to guide me on quantities of veg and water. In the end I needed about three times as much salt as I'd expected (but I am normally very cautious with salt so no real surprise) and also about three times as much fresh coriander leaf.

However, that is a very minor niggle indeed, and as I am hoping to use the thing in order to be able to offer simple evening meals to our B&B guests, my plan will be to produce consistent results from a limited range of trusted recipes. As soon as I get each recipe exactly the way I want it, I can just chuck everything in in the correct quantities from the get go and whoosh.

[Osem]

Sounds like a plan.

Soup's one of those things which offers infinite possibilities for very little in the way of ingredients, preparation and cost. We grow our own tomatoes and there's always a deluge at certain times so we've been using them for variations of tomato soup with such things as charred peppers, smoked bacon, chorizo, Stilton cheese etc. We've also been experimenting with various butternut squash recipes, including a mild 'curried' version. It wouldn't be hard to prepare and freeze batches of the base vegetables, herbs etc. to take advantage of low priced seasonal excesses then add the other defining ingredients on the day. That'd also cut down on the amount of work required when guests arrive.

As regards accompaniments, I'd imagine home-made bread might be more work than you'd want but we've found that there are some really great 'speciality' rolls available which can be bought either fresh then frozen at home or ready-frozen in places like Lidl and Aldi. That might be something to consider to make life easier and improve the margins.