When it comes to soups that are both simple yet scrumptious, no one does it better than the legendary Mary Berry. She has crafted an array of wildly delicious vegetable soup recipes over her 60-plus-year cooking career.
Having already made her family’s favourite tomato soup and her springtime minestrone soup and loving them, it was time to whip up her summer soup recipe, otherwise known as gazpacho. Gazpacho is a light and fresh no-cook soup made with the ripest tomatoes.
For this recipe, you will need a hand blender or food processor, so I decided to put the MultiQuick 9 Hand Blender which doubles up as a food processor to the test.
Braun is probably one of the first names you think of when it comes to small appliances. The brand designs and manufactures a huge range of household and personal care appliances, and is the global market leader for hand blenders.
Blenders really are an invaluable piece of kitchen equipment as they allow you to cut down on time, mess and equipment in preparing everyday foods, and treat properly they can last for many years.
Upon unboxing the Braun MultiQuick 9 Hand Blender MQ9187XLI, I found that the appliance comes with many parts. To start with there’s the XL food processor, chopper, a handful of different slicing and shredding blades, dough blades, and pretty much everything else you’d expect from a high-quality food processor.
What’s more, it’s also got a blender attachment, a whisk, a potato masher, and a mini chopper.
Retailing currently at £159 down from £199.99 on the Braun website, this blender is on the pricy side, but is it worth it?
Mary Berry’s gazpacho recipe
Ingredients (Three portions)
For the soup
30g white sourdough bread, crusts removed
500g medium very ripe tomatoes, skinned
One quarter large cucumber, peeled, deseeded and roughly chopped
Half a garlic clove, finely grated
Half a red pepper, deseeded and roughly chopped
Half a banana shallot, roughly chopped
Two tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
One tablespoon white wine vinegar
Half a tablespoon tomato puree
One quarter teaspoon sugar
For the garnish
Half a tomato, deseeded and very finely chopped
One eight cucumber, peeled, deseeded and very finely chopped
One eight red pepper, deseeded and very finely chopped
Method
I started by tearing the bread into pieces and placing them in a bowl before adding 75ml of water and leaving it to soak for 10 minutes.
I then cut each tomato in half, discarded the hard central stem, kept the seeds, and sliced the tomatoes into quarters.
After, I used the chopper attachment to make the large shallot pieces smaller. As soon as I turned it on, the shallot was completely blitzed almost instantly.
Next, I placed the tomatoes, cucumber, garlic, pepper, shallot, oil, vinegar, tomato puree and sugar into the bowl with the bread. I seasoned well with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
After, it was time to put the hand blender to the test to liquidise the ingredients for the soup. While a blending cup is an included accessory, I used a bowl as the cup was a little too small for the amount of soup I was making.
I blended the ingredients continuously for 50 seconds on the highest setting and it was easy to control the power with the extra-large control button.
There is also a safety feature, which requires you to first press down on the top section of the handle before pressing the trigger.
What’s more, the blender has what is called an active blade, meaning you can move the blade up and down while blending to reach deeper into a pan and increase circulation.
With most hand blenders, I find that they splash a lot leaving behind a lot of mess, but with this, that was not the case.
None of the ingredients were a challenge for this hand blender as the soup came out completely smooth.
With the ingredients combined, I poured the soup into a jug and left it to chill in the fridge for one hour before spooning the gazpacho into bowls, drizzling with olive oil and garnishing with the chopped vegetables.
The soup tasted delicious and took even less time to make due to how powerful this blender is.
