Running reference. Sourced in Montevideo. Start here before the shop and before you cook.
Vegetable Soup
From HoWon Noh's micronutrient soup protocol. Steam, blend, portion. One cook, seven days.
Why it exists. It replaces green powders. Spray drying destroys up to 90% of phytonutrients, and a 2022 Consumer Lab test found 2.1 µg of lead per serving of AG1. Whole vegetables keep the fiber, the phytonutrients and the nitrates. This is the substitute.
What each ingredient is for
Ingredient
His stated reason
Broccoli + cauliflower
Detoxification
Onion + garlic
Immune support
Carrot
Vision and skin
Bell pepper
Antioxidants
Shiitake
Autophagy
Grocery list (tap to tick)
Single batch is the card as written, roughly 4 portions. Week is doubled, roughly 8 portions, which covers his 7-a-week.
Item
Batch
Week (×2)
Broccoli brócoli
250 g
500 g
Cauliflower coliflor
150 g
300 g
Shiitake hongos shiitake
50 g
100 g
Onion cebolla
1
2
Carrot zanahoria
30 g
60 g
Bell pepper morrón
1
2
Asparagus espárragos
50 g
100 g
Garlic dientes de ajo
3
6
Pantry, buy once
Buying it in Montevideo
Asparagus is out of season. Uruguayan asparagus runs roughly September to November. In winter it is imported, expensive, or frozen. Swap it for puerro (leek), zapallo, espinaca or acelga and lose nothing. Frozen asparagus is fine too, since it all gets blended.
Shiitake is the hard one. Fresh is scarce. Dried (deshidratado) is easier, cheaper and keeps for a year. Use roughly 10 g dried per 50 g fresh and soak in hot water 20 minutes first. Pour the soaking liquid into the soup, that is where the flavour goes.
What
Where
Vegetables
Any feria, or Tienda Inglesa / Disco / Devoto
Nutritional yeast, dried shiitake
La Molienda, Av. Alfredo Arocena 2014, Carrasco. 091 853 460. Two minutes away.
Dried herbs
Supermarket, or in bulk at La Molienda
Say morrón, not pimiento. Nobody here will know what you mean otherwise.
Method
Prep. Rough-chop everything. Size barely matters since it all gets blended. If using dried shiitake, start the soak now.
Steam. 10 to 12 minutes total, until a fork goes through easily. No steamer basket needed, see the pot method below.
Blend with water. Add water gradually until it pours the way you want it. Start with about 250 ml per batch and go from there. The shiitake soaking liquid counts toward this.
Season at the blender. Salt, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, then parsley, basil, thyme and oregano. Nutritional yeast last, about a tablespoon per batch, to taste.
Portion and store. Into boxes. Four days in the fridge, freeze anything beyond that. He preps seven servings every Sunday inside a 90-minute block.
Add the fresh garlic raw, at the blender. Not in the steamer. Crushing garlic and leaving it a few minutes before it meets heat preserves allicin, the compound behind the 5 to 8 point systolic drop in the meta-analysis he cites. Garlic powder is in the recipe for flavour, not for that benefit. Real cloves do the work.
Pot method, no steamer basket
The distinction stops mattering here. Steam versus boil only matters because boiling leaches vitamins into water you then throw away. You are not throwing it away. The cooking water goes into the blender. So use a shallow puddle of water, keep the lid on, and pour the whole pot in. Nothing is lost.
Two fingers of water. About 2 to 3 cm in the bottom of the pot, roughly 300 ml. Enough to make steam for 12 minutes without boiling dry, not enough to submerge the vegetables.
Hard vegetables on the bottom. Carrot and cauliflower go in first, sitting in the water. They are the slowest and they can take direct heat.
Everything else stacked on top. Onion, morrón, then broccoli, shiitake and asparagus at the top. The upper layers cook in trapped steam. Do not pack it tight, steam needs somewhere to move.
Lid on, high until you hear it, then medium. Once it is hissing steadily, drop the heat. A tight lid is the whole trick. If yours is loose, put a tea towel between pot and lid and keep the corners well away from the flame.
10 to 12 minutes, one peek at 6. If the bottom looks dry, add a splash of hot water. Fork through a piece of carrot to check.
Do not drain. Tip everything, water included, into the blender. That liquid is where the water-soluble vitamins went.
If you want a real riser. Three balls of crumpled foil, or a small heatproof plate turned upside down, will hold the vegetables clear of the water and give you true steaming. Worth it if you dislike the slightly sulfurous smell brassicas give off in contact with water. Otherwise skip it.
Do not push past 12 minutes. Broccoli and cauliflower turn sulfurous and grey-green when overcooked, and that smell carries straight into the blend. Fork-tender is done. This is the one step where more is worse.
Storage and freezing
One cook on Sunday, eight portions, no cooking again until next weekend.
Where
How long
Use for
Fridge
4 days
Sunday cook covers you through Thursday
Freezer
3 months
Friday onward, plus spares
Split the batch the day you cook it. Four portions into the fridge, the rest straight into the freezer. Do not freeze on day three after it has been sitting, freeze it fresh and let the freezer hold it at its best.
Freezing rules that actually matter
Cool it first. Room temperature within about two hours, then into the cold. Hot soup in a freezer warms everything around it and puts the rest of your food through a thaw cycle.
Single portions, never one big block. You want to take out one meal, not chisel at a brick. Portion before it goes in.
Leave headspace. Soup expands roughly 10% as it freezes. Two to three centimetres of gap. In a full glass jar with a tight lid, that expansion cracks the jar.
If using jars, straight-sided and wide-mouth only. Shouldered jars trap the expanding ice and break at the shoulder. Flat freezer bags laid down are better anyway: they freeze faster, thaw faster and stack.
Label with the date. Every frozen soup looks identical at week six.
Getting it back
Thaw overnight in the fridge, or reheat gently straight from frozen with a splash of water and the lid on. Warm it through rather than boiling it hard.
Expect it to look separated. Blended vegetable soup splits a little on thawing. That is water releasing from the purée, not spoilage. Stir hard, or hit it with the stick blender for five seconds and it comes straight back.
Do not refreeze a thawed portion. Take out what you will eat.
Season the frozen half when you reheat it, not before. Dried herbs and nutritional yeast fade over weeks in the freezer. Hold a little back and stir it in fresh at the pot. Thirty seconds, and the ninth portion tastes like the first.
The 30-plant target
This is the part that is easy to get wrong. It is 30 different plants per week, not 30 ingredients in the bowl. From the American Gut Project, over 10,000 people: those eating more than 30 plant types a week had significantly more diverse microbiomes than those eating fewer than 10.
Herbs, spices, nuts and seeds each count as one. His own words: turmeric, cumin, parsley, basil, thyme all contribute.
This soup is about 13 distinct plants, and even that is generous since broccoli and cauliflower are the same species. He hits 30 with soup plus a fruit and nut bowl daily, not soup alone.
Nutritional yeast is not a plant. It is a yeast, so it does not count toward 30. Keep it anyway. It carries B-vitamins and it is the thing that makes a blended vegetable soup taste like food.
His own caveat, worth respecting. "Broccoli causes issues for people whose bacteria converts into sulfide gas. Spinach is problematic if your gut has low oxalate metabolism. Use the soup as a starting point, then adjust." This recipe is brassica-heavy. If you bloat in the first fortnight, that is the likely cause, and it is a reason to swap rather than push through.