Ginger Chicken and Rice Noodle Soup

Chicken noodle soup is what people eat when they feel unwell, which makes its absence from the elimination phase particularly unfair. Everything in the bowl is gentle. Nothing in it is hard to digest.

And yet a shop-bought carton of chicken stock will reliably ruin an afternoon.

The stock problem

This is the whole recipe. Everything else is straightforward.

Essentially every commercial chicken stock — cartons, cubes, powders, gels, “fresh” chilled tubs — is built on onion and garlic. They are usually the second and third ingredients after water, sometimes hidden further down as “natural flavouring”, “vegetable concentrate” or “yeast extract with vegetables”.

Soup is where this hurts most. A splash of stock in a risotto is a small dose; a bowl of soup is 250 ml of concentrated onion water, which is a substantial fructan load in one sitting.

There are three ways around it.

Buy a certified low-FODMAP stock. Massel and Fody both make them, and there are certified options in most markets now. This is the easy answer and worth the shelf space.

Make it. A chicken carcass, carrot, celery, a bay leaf, peppercorns and 2 hours of unattended simmering gives you better stock than anything in a carton and costs nothing. Freeze it flat in bags.

Use water and build flavour elsewhere. Water, plenty of ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil and the poaching liquid from the chicken itself gets you further than you would expect. It is thinner than a real stock, but it is not a compromise you will notice under this much ginger.

Ginger twice

The recipe adds ginger in two forms at two moments, and both are doing something different.

Sliced coins simmered in the broth give a rounded background warmth that infuses through the liquid. Grated ginger stirred in at the end keeps its volatile aromatics, which the long simmer would have driven off, and provides the sharp top note that makes the soup taste fresh rather than merely warm.

Doing only the first gives you a flat broth. Doing only the second gives you something that tastes like ginger sitting on top of hot water. Twenty-five grams in total sounds like a lot and is roughly right.

The bok choy limit

Bok choy is low FODMAP at one cup, about 75 g cooked, which is one small head per person.

Common bok choy specifically. The name gets applied loosely across several brassicas at supermarkets, and wombok, savoy cabbage and choy sum all behave differently and have different thresholds. If it came labelled as something else, look it up rather than assuming.