Gut Healing Chicken Broth
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If you have a gut that is in serious distress, this is my number one recipe, and I encourage you to make a pot at the beginning of the week and make sure you have a serving every day. The combination of gelation and minerals from the chicken bones, combined with the anti-inflammatory properties of the warming spices, makes for a serious medicine that will heal and seal the lining of your gut.
You can make this soup two ways. You can buy a whole chicken and roast it, and then use the cooked carcass for the bones. Alternatively you can buy chicken frames (the raw carcass of the chicken that has been stripped of it’s breast meat, wings and legs) from your local butcher, and use 2-3 of them as the base for your soup.
Chicken is the one meat I am fastidious about buying quality free range and organic. Your standard cage chicken has huge amounts of antibiotic residue in the meat, and it feels like this could be a significant hormone disruptor, particularly in women.
In NZ there is really only one organic chicken supplier - Bostocks from the Hawke’s Bay. There is no doubt that while they create a high quality product, it is also much more expensive. I balance this by making sure I use every bit of the chicken - initially roast it, use the leftover meat to make chicken wraps, and then boil the carcass to make this soup. It’s the way we would have always done it 50 years ago, and there’s something about the process that feels wholesome and circular.
If for some reason you can’t get hold of Bostocks, opt for a free range chicken, whose diet also includes worms and grubs that they’ve foraged themselves. You’ll find the meat will carry much less water, and be far less toxic. In addition the animals will have had a much nicer life, and that also feels good in your body.
Gut Healing Chick Soup
Serves 6
Ingredients:
1T olive oil
2 yellow onions finely chopped
1 leek sliced thinly
2 dessert spoons of freshly grated ginger
4 cloves of garlic chopped finely
The leftover carcass from a roast chicken or 2-3 raw frames from a free range (organic) chicken
1T cumin seeds
1T coriander seeds
1/2 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp chilli flakes (optional)
2 carrots finely diced
1 cube of vege stock (my favourite brand is Rapunzel - avoid anything like Oxo which will contain MSG)
Enough water to cover the meat carcass easily - keep topping up as needed
Salt - good quality and as much as you need to taste right for your palette
Directions:
Gently fry the onions and leek in olive oil in your soup pot, until they are soft and starting to go translucent.
Add the garlic and ginger and continue to fry for a few minutes.
Put the coriander seeds and cumin seeds in a mortar and pestle and crush them gently until you start to smell their aroma. The add them to the frying spices and onions.
Finally add your diced carrots, tumeric and optional chilli flakes and fry for another few minutes.
At this point add your chicken (bones, chicken fat, skin and all) and your water (at least 2 L or enough to cover the chicken frames) and bring to a boil.
Add 1tsp or more of salt and 1 cube of Rapunzel vege stock.
Reduce to a simmer and cook for at least 3 hours - the longer the better.
This soup is a broth. You can pick out the bones and whatever parts of the chicken you don’t want in the soup. Some people are not so keen on the chicken skin, so take that out before serving. If you don’t like whole pieces of vegetables floating in your soup, feel free to blend it once you’ve removed the bones.
If you prefer chunkier soups, add fresh veggies at this point, such as pumkin, carrot, celery, greens, broccoli. You can blend the soup once the veges have cooked through if you prefer.
Serve with life changing loaf or another gluten free bread of your choice.
Alternatively when cool, place one or two person portions in ziplock bags and freeze, to pull out when you need soup or a good quality broth from which to make other soups.