Have you ever noticed that when you do something really good complications soon arise. This time it was the purchase of a soup maker.
After having bought a soup maker too early and hating it, I waited a long time before trying again and I spent way too long studying all the features, but finally came up with 3 possibilities.
The Philips model was on sale used for half price, but so many reviewers stated, wrongly it turns out, that it was hard to clean. The Simple Living model was well advertized, but only available at full price. The Australian one had several excellent features, but 110 voltage was not one of them.
So I bought the Simple Living model new, but Amazon sent a used one. It wasn't hard to see it had been used as it had a visible scald ring. But I cleaned it up and tried it and it was instant love. This was even before Amazon kindly credited back a fair percentage of the price.
The instructions were adamant to use only as intended and not to reheat soup in it. So I immediately tried making gravy in it. Wonderful. Then pasta. Perfect Al dente. Then I took last night's soup which was chunky and ran it again as blended. Perfect! So I bought the used Philips ostensibly for my vacation cottage but can also see making pasta in one and fresh spaghetti sauce in the other.
So now how am I supposed to store all the extra food in the freezer, since the one "shortcoming" these delightful machines share is the minimum fill quantity is over a liter.
Enter Souper Cubes. Yes, they are perfect, although it took 24 hrs for the first soup I put in them to actually freeze. The soup had been refrigerated overnight before I poured it into the cubes so that seemed odd, but they came out really nice. This will revolutionize my freezer space as I will be using them for a lot more than soup.
And the soup makers? They are pretty much equal, but I am leaning toward favoring the Philips with its slightly smaller footprint, although I have not yet tried the milk soup option, which if it works well would move the Philips far into the lead.
Update: After my first try everything froze nicely overnight, and I have used the milk soup cycle with good results.
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