Purine - Boiling Soup

I mentioned Purine and Gout in one of my previous posts.  Recently, I learned that boiling meat/bones for many hours in water can significantly increase the amount of purine in the soup too.  Without going into details, the advice from doctors are: Do not boil meat/bones in the soup/broth for more than an hour.

Here's a Chicken soup recipe I tried last week, which tasted very good. My proof to my mum that we do not need to boil the chicken for many hours in order to get the taste.

Chicken Coconut Soup (for 2 pax):

1.  Get ready half a chicken, chopped into smaller pieces, wash clean.  If your pot is big enough, you can choose not to cut it into smaller pieces. No marination is needed.

2.  Get ready one young coconut.  Pour the juice into a bowl for later use.  Scrape off the coconut flesh if they are tender enough. Otherwise, do without the coconut flesh.

3.  Put the chicken into a pot with about four bowls of water.  Turn on high heat.  When the water boils, remove those floating impurities, and turn to low heat.  Let the chicken simmer for about 15 minutes.  Check that the chicken meat is cooked.

4.  With the low heat still on, add one teaspoon of cooking wine (I used Hua Tiao), two teaspoon of soy sauce, and a pinch of salt.  Pour the coconut juice and flesh in.

5.  Stir and taste.  Add more soy sauce/salt to your preference where necessary.  Steps 4 and 5 should be done within three minutes.  Turn the heat off.  The soup is ready.  Total boiling time should be less than 25 minutes in all for this recipe.

6.  There is no need to put the soup back into the coconut shell.  I did it for photo-taking.  In my soup I have also thrown in left-over fish balls but this is optional.

My take-away:  For those soups that are boiled or doubled boiled for many hours, we can still have them, as long as we don't drink them frequently.  However, for people with Gout issues, it is best to avoid these.