Advanced options
The universal ratio: roughly 500g of vegetables + 1 litre of stock makes ~1.3 litres of finished soup (3 mains). Blended soups shrink less than chunky ones (nothing to hide). Soup freezes beautifully in portion tubs: making double costs ten extra minutes and stocks a month of lunches: leave 2cm headroom in the tub, liquids expand.
What The Soup Portion Calculator Works Out
- Soup to make: people x millilitres per serving. 250ml serves a starter and 400ml a main alongside bread, so a family-of-four main is 1.6 litres and an eight-head lunch 3.2. Past four litres the stockpot clocks on.
- Rough shopping: about 380g of vegetables and 0.77 litres of stock per litre of finished soup, from the universal ratio of 500g vegetables plus 1 litre of stock making roughly 1.3 litres once simmering and blending settle it. Add an onion per litre and butter or oil to start.
- The formula: sweat the onions, add prepared vegetables and stock, simmer 20-25 minutes until tender, season properly, then blend or leave it rustic. Every named soup is this scaffold in costume.
- Appetite (advanced): scales every portion down 15% for light eaters or up 20% for hungry ones, which flows through the shopping, cost and pan size.
- Extra portions for the freezer and tub size (advanced): adds batch-cooking portions and counts how many tubs of your size you need. Leave 2cm headroom, add any cream after thawing, and most soups keep three months frozen.
- Cost per portion (advanced): vegetables at your per-kilo price (root vegetables are typically GBP 0.80 to GBP 1.50 a kilo), stock at cube, concentrate, fresh or homemade prices, plus about 20p an onion and 15p of fat. Root-vegetable soups land at 30p to 60p a portion, among the cheapest hot food a kitchen produces.
- Saving versus shop soup (advanced): compares your cost with a chilled carton (typically GBP 2.00 to GBP 2.50 for 600g) scaled to the same portion size. The cafe bowl at GBP 4 plus is frequently the same recipe again.
- Pan size needed (advanced): the finished volume plus 25% headroom so the simmer does not boil over and the stick blender has room to work.
- In pints (advanced): the same volume in imperial pints (568ml) for older recipes and pint-marked jugs.