I Wont Be Keeping A Stock Of Stock Pots In My Cupboard (Knorr Stock Pots)

Member Name: wigglylittleworm

Product:	Knorr Stock Pots
Date:	25/05/09 (226 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: overpriced, too salty, tastes artificial

The secret to a good soup is starting with a good quality stock for the base. I make my own chicken stock by boiling down chicken bones with water and it makes an exceptionally tasty soup but when I make my lentil soup only knorr ham cubes will do. I had spotted the knorr stock pots on the shelves of the supermarkets several times and wondered if they were any good but the price of around £2 for a box of eight potions put me off. Luckily one day they were on half price offer so I chucked them into my trolley.

Knorr claim that these stock pots are "a rich concentrated stock made from selected meats, herbs and spices that are gently simmered into a concentrated little pot" so I was expecting something better than a bog standard commercially prepared stock cube. I was not expecting it to be as good as my home made chicken stock but I was still expecting something good.

I decided to make chicken and sweetcorn soup using a stock cube as the base. This is ridiculously easy to make, just simmer together stock with shredded chicken and sweetcorn and five spice powder and just before serving slowly stir in a trickle of beaten egg to give it a nice thick texture. It tastes just like the soup from the Chinese and is a dish my daughter kept asking me to make and for once I never had any frozen stock ready to make it.

I got the knorr stock pot out to make the soup. I opened the plastic packaging to see what was inside and was greeted with a dark brown jelly with a smell like chicken flavoured crisps and lots of little flecks of herbs appearing. This artificial smell didn't exactly fill me with hope for the quality of the stock.

I did simmer some uncooked chicken with the stock for half an hour or so and then had a taste. What was in the pot was truly vile, absolutely nothing like any fresh stock I have tasted, oddly the first thing that sprang into my mind was those packets of dried chicken noodle soup which I have not eaten for years. The colour was dark brown unlike fresh stock which is a creamy colour and tasted extremely artificial and the taste of salt in particular was overwhelming. I ended up chucking the whole pot of food away as no way was I serving this muck.

When we look at the nutritional content I was shocked at the high salt levels, 100ml of prepared stock contains an astonishing 19% of your daily salt intake. I do watch my salt intake and as a result my taste buds have changed and I find very salty foods taste disgusting so the fact a 200ml bowl of soup made with this stock could contain 40% of my salt intake for the day really shocked me. I know that all pre-packaged stock is salty, I got knorr beef and ham cubes out to compare the salt levels and discovered that the stock pots contain far more salt than the bog standard stock cubes. I really wish that packaged foods in general contained less salt but the levels in this product in particular were disgusting.

I'm really disappointed with these stock pots especially as knorr is a brand I normally trust for stock cubes. They are charging a premium price for a product which does not justify the high price tag and tastes horrible, artificial salty and probably worse than their standard stock cubes which cost around half the price. I bet that celebrity chef Marco Pierre White who endorses these products does not use them in his own cooking!

Summary: A disapointment from Knorr