Gout safe vegetable soup 🧄

I can and do eat soups year-round. However, when it comes to stews, I prefer them in cold weather. But that is not a law, but in hot weather, lighter food is the way to go.

Quite often, I get asked the question of what foods cause gout? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Some foods are known to cause a gout flare. These include excess meat consumption, sugar, shellfish, MSG, and alcohol.

The next question will usually be what foods to eat with gout? This question is a little easier but still is not as straightforward as most people would like. I do my best to follow the Mayo Clinic Gout Diet. I have started eating many more vegetables, small portions of lean meat, no curred meat (sorry, but no ham or bacon), no shellfish, and I severely limit sugar and artificial sweeteners.

I recently started seeing a rheumatologist, and he suggested that I look into the Metabolic Syndrome diet. So I am somewhat combining the two. After cutting back on the simple carbs and sodium while increasing probiotic-rich foods, I am feeling better.

So let’s discuss what vegetables are bad for gout. I eat all vegetables. But some only in moderation. The ones that I eat in moderation are spinach, asparagus, mushrooms, and cauliflower. This recipe does include some spinach and mushrooms. If you are recovering from an attack of worried about having one, then leave them out. Some people also have problems eating tomatoes; one guy on the project will have a flare after eating half a tomato.

The day we made this soup using Instant Pot Red Beans. It was a full-on Louisiana Summer (hot and humid) day, but the soup was still good.

Soon after making the soup, we went on vacation to Osaka, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea. Both locations were also hot and humid.

We had a great time on vacation, but international travel while mostly following a gout diet is hard. Most of my favorite foods in Japan and Korea are off-limits. However, it does push me to try new foods, and now I have some new favorites like the spicy tofu stew from a tiny place that we found. It was a sweltering day, but the stew was great, and the tofu and kimchi dumplings were excellent.

This is a link to my guide on purine rice foods.

Enough about the vacation. Back to the veggie and red bean soup. Over the years, I had gotten good at making soups and stews using bone broth, etc. Since Bone broth is very bad for gout, it’s not on the menu. I had to start from scratch learning how to make soup. So let’s get started on delicious gout-safe/vegan soup recipes perfect for a cold day.

All great soups start with a great stock or broth. Since we’re not using bones technically, what we will make is the broth. In this case, we were going to make a nice and thick vegetarian broth.

Leeks will be one of our flavor building blocks. But depending upon the growing conditions, they can be filthy. These were actually very clean, but I will admit to profiling. All leeks are considered dirty until proven otherwise. Fair no, but that is how it is.

The first inspection is of the bottom part. Cut off the root, then cut in half to expose the bottom layers. Rinse in cold water while spreading the layers. Leeks are great at hiding specks of sand. You do not want sand in your broth.

Next, cut the top part in half, inspect, and rinse in cold water. After all of the sand has been removed, cut them into chunks. No reason for perfect they will be strained out later.

To a pot on medium heat, add one Tablespoon of oil and two leeks that have been cut up. Cook for about three minutes until they start to soften up.

Add two carrots that have been cut up. Mine were peeled so they would look good in the photo, but that is optional.

Add the top of a few celery stalks with leaves.

Cover with water (I used 8 cups), then add 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Bring to a simmer and cook until the carrots are very tender but not quite mush. This took me one hour. Then turn off the heat and let it cool down a little.

When the broth has cool to a safe to handle temperature, strain out the veggies, for this, I used a strainer lined with cheesecloth.

Remove the carrots and set them aside. Then squeeze most of the liquid out of the leeks and celery. This gave me six and a half cups of liquid.

Now that we have our homemade veggie broth, let’s talk about the rest of our ingredients.

Veggie broth: six and a half cups. You could use premade but this is better.

Potatoes: Two cups of diced potatoes. These were russet but use whatever kind you like. Before peeling and dicing, prepare a bowl with some water. As you cut them up, please put them in the water. Keeping them covered with water prevents browning.

Mushrooms: One cup of diced mushrooms. These were brown but get creative.

Cauliflower: One and a half cups of cauliflower cut into bite size pieces.

Onion: One cup diced onion.

Celery: One cup diced celery.

Garlic: One Tablespoon minced garlic.

Carrot: One cup of diced raw carrot. And the two carrots that we used for the broth. Keep them separated.

Red Beans: One and a half cup of red beans. This is equivalent to a 15 ounce can of beans. Or you can make your own in the Instant Pot as I did here.

Herbs: Two sprigs of rosemary and four sprigs of thyme get wrapped in cheesecloth. This makes it easy to remove them at the end of cooking.

Green beans: Not pictured since I did not plan to use them. But at the end of cooking, I added a 10.8-ounce package of frozen green beans. Feel free to add fresh ones earlier.

Spinach: Not pictured. Two cups of loosely packed fresh spinach.

Add the carrots to some of the broth and blend. I used this stick blender. You could dump all of the broth in a blender with the carrots and blend. But this stick blender is new, and I wanted to give it a test drive. Doing this gives the stock somebody and a nice color. You could blend all of the veggies, but then you would need to strain it.

This is what the broth looked like after blending the carrots.

With a pot on medium heat, add one tablespoon of oil, the onions, raw carrots, celery, and garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent (approximately three to five minutes).

When the onions are translucent, add the broth, potatoes, and herbs. Bring to a simmer and cook for ten minutes.

Add the cauliflower and red beans. Simmer another five minutes.

Add the frozen green beans package and cook until the potatoes and cauliflower are tender (approximately another five minutes).

At the end of cooking, stir in two cups of spinach. The heat from the soup will cook it; if you add it too soon, it will cook to mush. I am not a fan of mush.

This makes a great one pot meal but is really good with cornbread.

Other recipes of mine that you might enjoy.

• Beef and Radish Soup (Soegogi Muguk: 쇠고기무국)
• Easy kong-guksu recipe🍜
• Instant pot rajma recipe 🧅
• Ten Foods to avoid with gout
• Your Guide to Purine-Rich Foods

A great recipe by Thrifty Lesley for an inexpensive but delicious and healthy soup made with butternut squash, coconut, lentils, and ginger.