Get Started On GAPS With This Easy Pot of Soup

Dr. Natasha outlines the GAPS nutritional protocol on her website and gives a recipe for Introduction Soup, I’m going to convert that recipe into standard recipe format to make it easier to get started.

Please note there is a difference between meat stock and bone broth. Many people coming to GAPS assume they are making bone broth, but the process which Dr. Natasha describes on her site for making Introduction Soup is meat stock.  She has also answered a question regarding meat stock and bone broth in her Frequently Asked Questions page:

Easy Pot of Soup or Homemade Soup Using Your Homemade Stock

• 8 cups homemade stock (see recipes and more instructions below)
• 1 chopped onion
• 2 carrots, sliced
• 2 cups cauliflower broken into small pieces
• 2 zucchini squash, peeled and seeds removed (if any viable ones are present) and diced

Bring stock to a boil and add vegetables.  Once again bring to a boil, and then lower heat until the soup is on a simmer.   Cook for twenty to thirty minutes, testing the vegetables to make sure they are very soft, this makes them easier to digest.  Add in the meats and other soft tissues (you may wish to blend the soft tissues first so as to make the soup more palatable).  An easy way to make a nice creamy soup is to blend the vegetables and stock, and “soft bits” and then add in pieces of meat to the creamed soup.

You can read the original post here: http://gapsdietjourney.com/2011/10/get-started-with-gaps-with-this-easy-pot-of-soup/

Meat Stock

• joints, bones, a piece of meat on the bone, a whole chicken, giblets from chicken, goose or duck, whole pigeons, pheasants or other inexpensive meats. (“It is essential to use bones and joints, as they provide the healing substances, not so much the muscle meats.  Ask the butcher to cut in half the large tubular bones, so you can get the bone marrow out of them after cooking.“)
• water to cover
• unprocessed salt to your taste
• about 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, roughly crushed

Fish Stock

• whole fish or fish fins, bones and heads
• water to cover
• unprocessed salt to your taste
• about 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, roughly crushed

Basic Chicken Stock Intermediate(although Dr. Natasha says to start this from the get-go I found it hard to incorporate the “soft bits”, marrow, etc. immediately so I have separated the two basic chicken stocks)

• 1 whole chicken
• 12 cups water
• Unprocessed salt to your taste
• 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, roughly crushed

Bring to a boil. After one-half hour, remove the scum that risen to the top.

Continue to simmer for 2 to 2.5 hours. Remove the bones and meat to separate bowl, and strain the stock to remove small bones and peppercorns.  Separate the meat from the bones and other pieces.  Your strained chicken stock can be served to your patient, or you can make your first pot of homemade soup.

Here’s the intermediate part.Remove all the soft tissues from the bones as best as you can to add to soups.  Soft tissues as I understand it are basically anything “soft” that could be blended.  Also, cooking the gelatinous soft pieces for a longer cooking period will cause them to completely melt.  Take care that you do not include any pieces of bone or hard pieces as you will cause the texture to become grainy which can be unpalatable.  Remove bone marrow from bones while they are warm, for chicken bones this would be accomplished by cracking open the chicken leg bones and thigh bones. If they are cooked long enough, they will simply crumble.

Okay, now it’s time for homemade soup using your homemade stock.  Dr. Natasha mentions these vegetables specifically:

Recommended Vegetables for Intro Soups

“You can choose any combination of available vegetables avoiding very fibrous ones, such as all varieties of cabbage and celery. All particularly fibrous parts of vegetables need to be removed, such as skin and seeds on pumpkins, marrows and squashes, stock of broccoli and cauliflower and any other parts that look too fibrous. Cook the vegetables well, so they are really soft.”

• Onions
• Carrots (remove skin)
• Broccoli (remove fibrous parts)
• Leeks
• Cauliflower (remove fibrous parts)
• Courgettes
• Marrow
• Squash (remove seeds and in winter squash, the skin)
• Pumpkin (remove seeds and skin)

Vegetables to Avoid for Intro Soups

• Celery
• Cabbage

It’s so easy to make a pot of soup and get started on GAPS. The healing properties of broth are enormous and if you are interested in learning more please go here to read a white paper which will tell you all you ever wanted to know about broth:Traditional Bone Broth in Modern Health and Diseaseby Allison Siebecker. She defines what broth is, explains the basic method for making it, describes the nutritional content from the connective tissue, bones, bone marrow, cartilage, collagen, gelatin, and then explains the amino acid profile of broth, and she discusses the minerals and macrominerals in broth. She also gives an extensive list of conditions which can benefit from adding broth into the diet.  Quite a complex and informative read about broth which I highly recommend.

You can read the original post here: http://gapsdietjourney.com/2011/10/get-started-with-gaps-with-this-easy-pot-of-soup/

You can read the original post here: http://gapsdietjourney.com/2011/10/get-started-with-gaps-with-this-easy-pot-of-soup/