Morphy Richards Soupmaker

Soup is one of those perfect winter foods, and the new Morphy Richards Soupmaker aims to make the process of making soup an easy one. The idea is simple: throw your ingredients in and let the appliance do the rest. Could it really be that easy?

Features

A combination of plastic and metal, the Morphy Richards Soupmaker sits a little over 30cm high and looks a lot like a kettle. Its two core parts comprise a one litre jug with a handle and a lid/cover with stick mixer and control panel.

The jug integrates a heating element into its base, and there’s a three-prong male jug plug connection below the handle for connecting to mains power. The top section has its own handle a built in motor and a small stick mixer that descends into the jug. Morphy Richard’s control panel features three button settings: Smooth (15 minutes – creating a smooth soup mixture), Chunky (25 minutes – making soup with chunks of ingredients), and Blend.

The box also comes with a measuring jug, an instruction manual and a three-prong female jug plug for powering the Soupmaker.

Performance

What is effectively a kettle and a stick mixer combined, the Morphy Richards Soupmaker is designed to make it easy to cook soup from fresh ingredients. The manual comes complete with some recipes, so we grabbed the ingredients for pea and ham soup, piled them in, and hit the Smooth button.

From here, the Soupmaker warms up like a kettle, heating the ingredients from below while the small blade works to break up the chunkier parts of the mixture. After 15 minutes, a ‘beep’ provided the signal to throw in additional ingredients and activate the Blend button for a few seconds, quickly cutting up our add-ins and making the mixture complete.

Voila. Green, tasty soup.

Each of the three buttons do different things, but the only two that need to be remembered are the smooth and chunky settings. Smooth will gradually pulp everything to make the soup into a more combined final result. Chunky does exactly what you’d think: it churns more slowly and keeps chunks of food in the soup, so there’s still something to chew, useful if you want large chunks of meat or veggies in your dinner.

Note that you can’t cook meat in the Soupmaker, so any beef, chicken or pork needs to be pre-cooked. You will also need to add stock – vegetable, chicken, or beef – to your soup, just like you would in a conventional pot. Ingredient size will also need to be watched with the Soupmaker. You’re not going to throw in a whole celery, but the ingredients will need to be cut up into small pieces.

Cleaning the Soupmaker is nowhere near as rewarding as the making of the soup. Because there are electronics in both the jug and the lid cover, you can’t submerge either section in water for a quick and simple wash. A wet wipe over is more like what’s required. It’s fiddly too, especially around the blade, which cannot be separated from the lid cover.

Conclusion

The Soupmaker does exactly what it claims to do: it makes soup. It does it no better than a pot and a $15 stick mixer, though, which makes its $170 asking price hard to justify. Unless, of course, you don’t have a stove.

This Soupmaker, then, is ideal for travellers, students in dorm accommodation or those people (such as kids and the elderly) who are best kept away from hotplates and open flames.

We suspect it will also find a place in the cabinet alongside the many appliances from long gone Fathers Days, birthdays and Christmases whose utility was short lived. Instant wine cooler, omelette maker or egg poacher anyone?