The New Covent Garden Soup Company pioneered the concept in the 1990s and today, most supermarkets sell own-brand fresh soups, a product that, uniquely in the field of “ready meals”, is reasonably reliable (or so I thought). Soup suits automation. Take the right ingredients and the right recipe, and you can produce tasty soup in industrial quantities. You don’t need to be a genius. It doesn’t require human intervention. The machines have got it covered. But did this latest taste test of the supermarkets’ best-selling luxury chilled soups bear out that faith? Were they souper or a pathetic pottage?
Morrisons, M Signature Petit Pois & Wiltshire-Cured Ham, 600g, £1.26
Don’t sweat the fact that said “Wiltshire-cured ham” (how British and bucolic does that sound?) is actually “produced in the UK using EU pork”, because those tiny, flavourless nuggets of pig, just 5% of the total ingredients, bring nothing to the party (with so much liquid, how is the meat so dry?). Think of this as a luxuriously thick pea soup, but one so one-dimensional and boring (it needs far more mint) that you could easily fall asleep in it, mid-spoonful, and drown. You have been warned. 3/10
Marks & Spencer, Super Chicken Mulligatawny, 600g, £2.50
Thanks to its chunks of tomato, a little mango chutney, lime and some assertive ginger, this seesaws between sweet and savoury flavours in a way that keeps you interested to the bottom of the bowl. Plenty of lentils, split peas and vegetables mean that, as well as delivering punchy flavours, it is a hearty mouthful, too. Yes, the chicken thigh meat has been shredded into woolly little flavour-free, fibrous strands, but that is chicken in supermarket soups for you. 7/10
Waitrose, Pork, Lentil and Kale, 600g, £2.49
Sounds like a hearty and trendy (kale!) winter warmer, but it reads better than it tastes. It is packed with green lentils, the pork and smoked bacon comes in weeny, mealy bits and, like the kale, the splash of white wine is barely discernible. Beyond a residual fennel/aniseed note, it doesn’t taste of anything significantly. It is a Premier League footballer of a soup: thick, rugged, rather bland. 4/10
Sainsbury’s, Taste The Difference Chorizo & Butterbean, 600g, £2
Its alluringly smoky paprika aroma promises big things which, broadly, it delivers. The chorizo is dry, tough and pretty flavourless (the theme here: don’t put meat in chilled fresh soups), but its arc of flavour – almost overly sweet at first, but bottoming out in paprika-powered smoke and heat – is deeply satisfying. It is a chunky soup too, full of still al dente onion and silky red peppers. As good as your Andalucían grandmother used to make. 7/10
Asda, Extra Special Spanish Chorizo and Butterbean, 600g, £1.50
Smells strangely musty and tastes somewhat lacklustre, too. There is a little smokiness playing at its edges and the chorizo tastes of more than its Sainsbury’s rival (albeit in a rather astringent way), but the predominant flavours are tomato and toothsome celery. That isn’t bad, but it is dull. The Sainsbury’s version is as warm and inviting as a village bonfire. This is Cub scout kindling. 5/10
Aldi, Specially Selected Sri Lankan Chicken Soup, 600g, £1.49
Time to play “hunt the chicken” (again), but this soup is juicy with plump tomato pieces, boasts a solid if unsophisticated heat (all ginger, chillies and white pepper) and its distinctive coconut milk creaminess is nicely offset by plenty of chopped spring onion. The trouble is, it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t evolve. Ultimately, it is just tomato soup with knobs on. 6/10
Lidl, Chef Select Leek & Potato, 600g, 89p
Tastes thinner than it looks (the recipe is a bit parsimonious with the single cream, presumably) and, while it signs off with a burst of white pepper, it could do with more vigorous seasoning. But for just 89p, it isn’t half bad, as long as you can supply your own salt and black pepper. The accurately cooked pieces of potato and leek are plentiful and the flavour is there, it just needs a leg-up. 5/10
Co-op Truly Irresistible Moroccan Chicken, 600g, £2.60
The chicken? Forget it, it is an afterthought. An irrelevance. The key point is that this foregrounds hardy ingredients that can withstand the production process (chickpeas, lentils, carrot) in a broth that – deftly sweetened with acacia honey and apricots, and heady with ras el hanout spice mix – genuinely tastes as if it originated, however remotely, in a Marrakech marketplace, rather than a factory in Yorkshire or wherever. Each mercurial mouthful is alive with robust, earthy spicing. 8/10
Tesco, Finest Italian Vine Ripened Tomato and Lentil, 600g, £2.40
In winter, we crave soups that will bring a warm glow to our tired, vitamin-D-deprived souls. We demand spiritual as well as physical nourishment. On which criteria, this (underseasoned, no real depth of flavour) soup is a fail. The ingredients include roast garlic puree, but it needs something more (meat stock?) to turn this rather ho-hum pot of veggies (the cubes of potato feel fibrous and undercooked at their edges) into something profound. It’s tomatoey, it’s lentil-y, but beyond that? Nothing. 4/10
