We had an interesting question from one of our readers that seemed, on the face of it, like a question we shouldn’t need to answer. However, after giving it a little bit of thought, and a little bit of research, it’s actually a really glaring omission from our site, and in fact the internet as a whole. The crux of the questions was simply ‘How do you use a soup maker?’, and to anyone that’s been using one for a while, that’s quite obvious, but if you don’t have one, it really isn’t.
Having spoken to a few people, it seems that we’ve been making an incorrect assumption, at least partly. It’s easy to assume a level of knowledge that people have when looking for a soup maker, that they actually know how soup is made. I’m not talking about the cooking process specifically, but what goes into it, and in turn why having a soup maker is a great investment at home.
What’s compounding the problem is that Google is turning up relatively few useful answers as to how to use a soup maker. So, let’s address the question from a couple of different angles.
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How Do Soup Makers Cook Soups?
When you buy a soup maker, you’ll obviously get an instruction manual to tell you how to use it. That’s not a lot of use though, when you’re trying to decide which are the best soup makers 2018 has to offer you. While we’re not going to go into the specifics about each make and model here, the general concept is the same regardless of which model you buy. Some have more advanced features than others, but on the whole you want to be buying one that blends up your ingredients and heats them gently – which is the cooking aspect of their functionality. The ingredients you load into the machines, and how you prepare them, is dependent upon the recipe you’re following, but the automatic programs will take it from there for you. Typically, those programs will take around 30 minutes, sometimes a little less. The better quality soup makers will also keep the soup warm for you for longer, with a combination of a better insulated chamber to retain heat, and keep warm functions from the element (that works in a similar way to an electric kettle).
What Are The Recipes I Should Start With?
That nicely brings us to the second approach to answering the question – how to use the soup makers in the sense of what to put in them. That’s down to personal choice – many people will simply stick to a few simple recipes, while others will quickly progress on to experiment with new ideas to personalise their creations to suit their own tastes. Rather that trying to reinvent the wheel here, there are an absolute ton of recipe websites out there on the web – just have a quick search and see what you find. In general, the only thing you should keep in mind is that the chunkier you cut up your ingredients, the longer they’ll take to cook. That means that bigger chunks will end up less soft than smaller ones, if you cook them in the same way in your soup maker. Additionally, be aware that soups containing meat should usually have that meat content prepared (cooked) separately ahead of putting it into the soup maker. Unless your user guide tells you otherwise, the programs aren’t designed to reach a high enough temperature for a long enough period to safely cook raw meat.
So there it is, our quick and simple guide to soup maker use – check out our best soup makers guide on the homepage to choose your product!