29 Pine Brae Drive, Skillman NJ 08558

Potassium Broth Recipe  

(AKA Dr. Ginsburg's Immune Broth)

  • Nourishes and strengthens your immune system against colds and flu 

  • Rich in potassium 

  • Rich in plant immune agents (phytochemicals) to powerfully fight disease and build your immune system so it fights disease better.

  • Contains powerful cancer fighting and disease fighting phytochemicals.

  • Tasty.

This potassium broth is full of foods and herbs that strengthen the immune system.

A daily dose is great at preventing flu and colds, or helping you to get over them.

Extremely easy to make, this recipe uses vegetables packed with important minerals (especially potassium), as well as phytochemicals (plant-produced chemicals different from vitamins or minerals) that are incredibly effective at nourishing and healing your body as well as strengthing its ability to fight disease.

Properly stored in mason jars, we find it can last months in the fridge.. (See below.)
How and when to use:
Consider this mineral broth as a daily tonic to prevent flu and colds all winter long. If someone in your close circle has become sick, consider it as part of your your preventive for flu, colds, sore throat, or any illness.In addition, consider the other healing tools we list.

If you are already sick, make the broth without the astragalus, since astragalus is a tonifying herb that strengthens the body's perfomance in its current state. You don't want to strengthen the body to exist with the disease, you want the body to eliminate the disease.

It's a great way to make miso soup with strong nutrient broth.

In addition, by consuming it while healthy you are building your immune strength, so you get sick less often.

In my family, we had  some of this almost every day during the last two winters. Once every month or so we'd cook a double batch and preserve it in mason jars in the fridge.

When it wasn't a cup or two mixed with soy sauce, we added miso soup mix for a side dish or used it in cooking whenever broth was needed.  And my husband, who usd to get frequent winter colds, had only one over the past two winters. (Note: we also started taking capsules of 2000 to 5000 units of vitamin D daily, which also makes a big difference in preventing colds. Nearly all people in the colder parts of North America turn deficient in vitamin D shortly after they are no longer out in the sun regularly.)

We eat the broth at any meal and use it -
  • to cook hot cereal in the morning, 
  • to cook rice or lentils or 
  • to add to stews or other dishes. 
  • as stock for soup
6 shitake mushrooms,
1 reishi mushroom,
1 ounce maitake mushroom,
6 pieces astragalus root,
1 piece kombu,
4 carrots,
1 large yellow onion (skin and all),
1 bunch parsley,
1 gallon distilled water.  

About the mushrooms:
Making a mushroom broth like this one is possibly the best way to get the immune benefits from the mushrooms.

Add herbs together with water;
bring to boil;
simmer for 2 hours;

Add minced garlic and/or tamari to taste. The broth really needs either salt or tamari or miso.

The potassium broth is fabulous with a tablespoon of miso paste per 16 ounces of broth. Thanks to Paul Santos for this discovery, who is adding a little seaweed and giving it to his kids as their miso soup.

Wakes up the broth nicely. Use tamari as needed until it tastes good, and don't worry about the amount of salt.

If you pour it into mason jars and tighten down the lid while still very hot, a vaccum seal will form as it cools that helps preserve it for longer periods, though we still keep it all in the fridge.

We use a 3.5 gallon pot to make a double batch of the immune potassium broth, yielding two gallons. Stored in the mason jars, this lasts our family about a month.

Modifying the recipe - Why these ingredients?

You can add other vegetables to this recipe. The base  plays well with others, but only use vegetables with a high potassium content to preserve all the benefits of the broth.

Potassium is a key electrolyte that supports the healing and recuperation process. It also supports the nervous system, muscle function, heart function, headaches, and metabolism of protein and carbohydrate.

Consider adding one of the following:
Spinach (558 mg potassium/100 grams)
Beet greens (762 mg potassium/100 grams)
Kale  (447 mg potassium/100 grams)
Swiss Chard

(Chart of potassium content of some foods.)

Ingredients in the recipe:

High in potassium, as muchrooms tend to be, and with powerful immune benefits. The article is from Science Daily
High in potassium and has powerful immune benefits. Article from Sloan Kettering Research Institute
High in potassium and has powerful immune benefits. Article from cancer.org
Great immune strengthener. Article from the University of Maryland Medical Center

Kombu (also known as laminara)
The highest potassium sea vegetable, and rich with many other nutrients. 6 mg potassium per 100 mg
High in potassium. Article from Woman's Day magazine on several foods, including carrots.

Very high in potassium. Parsley tea has been used to make potassium tea as a help to healing.

An article from Harvard Medical School on multiple foods  that nourish the immune system, (including onions).

NOTE about cancer fighting properties: Several of the links above refer to cancer fighting effects of the ingredient, but the ability to fight cancer is largely the result of a healthy immune system, which these ingredients help to build. Although we spend a lot of time and money studying cancer, it is usually studied in isolation from our whole immune system, so the data we get from such tests tends to miss this larger issue.

Thanks for the recipe go to Theresa Boardwine, who included it in a lecture she called Cooking with Immune Potentiating Herbs and Foods, presented at the Medicines from the Earth conference in 2010.