When Cuisinart offered me one to review, I asked my mum, Mamta, to put it through its paces, as she regularly makes soups at home. This burly blender is a pain to clean, as its blades aren’t removable. Navigating my fingers around the sharp metal to pick out pieces of lentil was a challenge. If you make a lot of soup, investing in a good soup machine will save you time and effort. Read our review of this Cuisinart model to see how it performed in our tests.
For her second trial, she made prawns in tomato sauce, a pasta sauce recipe also from the recipe booklet. You need time to chop, slice, sauté and stir—which occupies all your burners and leaves Burj Khalifa-sized stack of pots and pans in your sink at task’s end. Nothing quite beats a soul-warming, homemade soup.
Or alternatively you have the SoyaJoy kitchen gadget that makes soup, soy milk and a few other things and is more in the style of a soup maker. But if you are outside of the UK, then you won’t find the same choice in soup makers. You get what you pay for, the Morphy Richards Soup Maker is really cheap compared to the cuisinart pots and pans set. The Cuisinart Soup Maker had a much better blender and a capacity to bulk cook soup. Its easy to clean and we love also using it for if we just want a quick batch of soup to go with dinner.
Whether you are making chunky or smooth soups, jams, sauces for pasta, curries or tasty risottos you can complete every stage of your recipe in the Cuisinart Soup Maker. Watch your ingredients as they cook inside the robust glass jar, adjust the heat settings, add ingredients and stir as required to achieve perfect results. While its basic design has evolved from that of a standard blender, the Cuisinart SSB1U Soup Maker promises to tackle much more than just blitzing food and ice. A booklet of recipes is also included for inspiration. Cuisinart’s automatic soup makers take the hard work out of creating healthy homemade soups from scratch. These ingenious kitchen companions sauté, cook, simmer and blend your favorite soup ingredients into tempting hot soups in a matter of minutes.
Others even have a self-clean mode, though I found you often still need to rinse or scrub in the sink. A keep-warm function maintains the soup’s temperature for a limited time after cooking, up to an hour, in most cases. Usually, you can reheat your soup in the device. The first thing I made was a simple lentil soup. The blender lid houses a measuring cup, too. It is, admittedly, a tad more hands-on than some soup makers – the aforementioned sautéing, for example, requires you to switch between functions during cooking.
Need to dice carrots, onions, and celery for minestrone? Leave ’em in, add some oil, and turn the knob to low. Basically, you can cook an entire soup in the 48-ounce capacity unit (56 ounces if you’re using it with cold items like smoothies or shakes) with minimal prep.
All soup makers make a bit of a racket when blending, but some are noisy during cooking too. The blender makes smoothies in no time at all, too. More sophisticated models come with additional functions, some of which are useful, though they tend to drive up the prices. Some have a sauté function, to brown off onions and garlic, for example, for added depth of flavour or colour.