Quest - the Hunt for Good Tomato Soup. (Did every cream of tomato soup, and others, change recently?)
It started out with Tesco, their soup tasted like chemicals out of the blue, it's a new batch. Any batch numbers starting with 5 are safe, 6 is where the problem starts. This soup was a near daily staple for me, now I am soupless. And it gets worse - minestrone is doomed to the same existence, 5 is good, 6 is demon diarrhoea. I'll try the vegetable soup next, that has a tomato base though it lacks the one thing I believe is to blame - basil extract.
I've tried One Stop, Co-op, Waitrose, and Lidl - they're all the same. 5 is safe and full of tomatoey goodness, 6 is something that deserves to be poured down the toilet and treated like the shit it is.
All of these share the same common ingredients, including basil extract. My hypothesis is that they have changed the type/source of their basil extract, meaning theres no need to announce a "new recipe" because there isn't, just the ingredient itself has been changed to a different type/version.
I'm yet to try Sainsbury's, Asda, and M&S, but if anyone can say whether they've noticed a difference there, that would aid in my quest for good tomato soup.
Just to note - I refuse to eat Heinz. That stuff tastes like sweet tomato whatever and I can't stand it. I require the taste of tomato to be strong, it's in the name, nothing else should overwhelm it, and the cream needs to complement it nicely, not too much and not too little. Also, the cheaper the soup, the better, I don't want to be paying over £1 per soup since I eat so much of it, even that is pushing it, Tesco was like 59p.
This is an emergency quest - "The Hunt for Good Tomato Soup".
Reward - my undying appreciation and some various animal memes.