From the pumpkin patch ...: it's a cold winter's day, you're hungry and don't feel like cooking--how about a steaming hot bowl of ready-made pumpkin soup? (Pumpkin soup).

Publication: Choice (Chippendale, Australia)

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Australian Consumers' Association

There's nothing quite like a bowl of steaming hot soup to warm you up on a cold day. Vegetable-based soups are a good choice from a nutrition perspective--add a bread roll (without loads of butter) and you've got a complete meal. But gone are the days when powdered and condensed soup was all you could buy--now there are also refrigerated and shelf-stable ready-to-serve soups.

Powder soups have their uses but most people wouldn't pick them for a gourmet experience. Some of the other soups suggest you'll get quite a taste experience with them, so we put them to the taste test. Unfortunately, only two of the soups included even rated higher than 50%.

The taste test

We enlisted 23 people to blind-taste pumpkin soups and assess their taste and texture. We chose pumpkin soup as it's the biggest-selling flavour in the ready-to-serve soups market.

Trialists preferred soups that were creamy, smooth and had a thick texture. They were also keen for the soup to taste of pumpkin, never mind what other ingredients were included to liven it up. Soups that tasted homemade, rich, fresh and spicy rated better.

None of the soups excelled for either taste or texture. The two most-liked were CAMPBELL'S Velish and CAMPBELL'S Country Ladle--see the profiles, far right, for what made them better than the rest.

Price...

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