The Heal Your Gut Cookbook Review: Useful GAPS Cooking

The Heal Your Gut Cookbook is a useful companion when you understand the GAPS food guidance but still need help turning it into meals. Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett connect the kitchen basics with soups, dinners, sauces, lunches, snacks, and treats. My strongest reason for recommending it is that connection: a preparation you learn near the beginning becomes something you can use again in several different dishes.^[1]

My family has followed GAPS since July 2024. Starting a pot of meat stock in the morning has been one of the practical things that made it work in our house. We can drink it or have soup, and what goes into the pot can change with the budget and what is available. That is the kind of useful foundation I look for in a GAPS cookbook. You need food you can keep making, with enough ways to serve it that you can plan beyond the next bowl.

This book gives you a broad collection to work from. It asks you to cook from scratch and prepare some ingredients ahead, so it suits a reader who wants to build those skills. Here is where I think it earns its place, what the cooking involves, and how I would use its 2014 guidance alongside Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s newer program book.

What the Book Is For

Boynton and Brackett wrote a cooking companion to the GAPS program. Their opening tells readers to read Campbell-McBride’s own book before beginning. The recipes then help with the practical question of what to make from the foods you have introduced.^[1]

The authors’ note explains the voice of the book: they chose Hilary’s narrative, with Mary’s photographs supplying the visual material. Both are named authors. Hilary writes conversationally about feeding a family, learning unfamiliar methods, and finding ways to make the food appealing. Those accounts give the recipes a household context, while the basic preparations give the reader something concrete to learn.

The organization moves from pantry and kitchen preparation into essential methods, the six Intro stages, and a larger Full GAPS collection. That later collection matters. A book that helps with the first few soups also needs to be useful when you are making lunches, serving guests, or looking for another way to cook chicken. This one has a substantial range beyond its opening Intro chapters.

Find The Heal Your Gut Cookbook in my Amazon book collection.

One Preparation, Several Meals

The essential-techniques section is the part I would read before choosing a week’s recipes. It explains preparations that come back throughout the book, including stock, nut and coconut ingredients, and cultured dairy. Learning those first makes later ingredient lists easier to understand.^[1]

The stock section shows this particularly well. You have cooked meat and vegetables as well as the liquid. The text describes turning those into stew, adding more stock for soup, or using the cooked meat in another meal. It helps you see the whole result of the pot, rather than planning a stock batch and dinner as two unrelated jobs.

The nut and coconut preparations have a similar connection. After straining homemade milk, the pulp has further uses. The later nut-pulp section gives sweet and savory possibilities, including truffles, cookies, and a hummus-style dip. Coconut pulp also connects to the homemade flour method. That is useful planning information: before making milk, you can decide whether another preparation will use what remains.

These examples are why I find the book’s approach persuasive. You are learning a small group of preparations that can support a wider menu. The benefit depends on choosing dishes that share ingredients and fit the foods you currently tolerate; you do not have to make every component in the book at once.

How It Teaches Cooking

Some of the most helpful instruction is in the small physical details. When making nut flour, the book tells you to watch the texture because continued processing turns it into nut butter. In a cracker recipe, it explains that the crackers become crisper as they cool. In the berry tart, it tells you to fold the cream filling gently because too much agitation can turn it into butter.^[1]

Those details give you something to look for as you work. A timer can tell you when to check, but it cannot tell you whether your particular mixture has reached the right texture. I value a cookbook that explains what changes in the food and where a little attention makes a difference.

Monica Corrado’s salad-dressing contribution is another good example. It explains a dressing in parts, tells you to keep the measuring unit consistent, and then develops the base into several kinds of dressing. Finished recipes follow. You can follow one immediately, then use the underlying pattern when you are comfortable varying it.

The depth varies across the collection. Some recipes have a short, conversational method; others include a fuller explanation or several components. If you want extended teaching on a specific GAPS kitchen method, my review of Corrado’s cooking-techniques book explains its different role.

What You Can Cook

The range is useful because it changes the form of a meal as well as its main ingredient. Soup, stock-simmered meatballs, a stew with a cauliflower topping, a chicken salad, and a roast ask different things of the cook and offer different textures at the table. The book gives you several ways to approach the same question: what can I make with the foods already available to me?^[1]

Sauces and condiments add a great deal of variety. The collection includes mayonnaise, mustards, ketchup, barbecue sauce, pestos, chimichurri, and tomato sauces. These can give a familiar piece of meat or a plate of vegetables a different direction. Their value is in having useful accompaniments ready, rather than needing an entirely new main dish whenever dinner feels repetitive.

There is room to learn unfamiliar ingredients. The organ-meat chapter includes a meat loaf with organs mixed into ground meat, along with preparations in which liver or hearts have a more prominent role. That gives you choices about how to begin. In my own family, organ meats have been easier to include mixed into ground-beef meals.

The later chapters help with food away from the main dinner plate. Meal salads, crackers, nut-pulp snacks, and desserts broaden the possibilities for lunches and occasions. The berry tart, for example, uses a pressed nut-and-coconut crust with a cultured-cream filling and fruit. It shows how an occasion dessert can be assembled from preparations found elsewhere in the book.

Choose those dishes around the main foods of GAPS and your own introductions. In Gut and Physiology Syndrome, Campbell-McBride keeps meat stock, soups, stews, natural fats, and nourishing main meals central; baking and fruit have a smaller place.^[2] The cookbook’s treats add options for that place rather than replacing the daily meal foundation.

Using It With the Current GAPS Books

The stage chapters make it easy to find ideas as Intro progresses. Use those headings with Campbell-McBride’s program guidance and the exact ingredients and preparation in the recipe you are considering. A dish’s chapter location is a starting point for choosing it, while the actual food and method determine whether it fits your stage.^[1][2]

The cookbook describes Intro with a short calendar, while also allowing slower progress and a return to an earlier stage when new foods cause reactions. The 2020 book makes symptom-led progression clear. Your next food introduction depends on how you are doing, so you do not need to make your progress match the cookbook’s rough number of days.^[1][2]

Two specific updates are worth keeping beside the recipes. First, Campbell-McBride’s 2020 book recommends meat stock and keeps bone broth out for at least a year, and for some people several years. The cookbook’s earlier suggestion of introducing bone broth after Intro is therefore not the timing I use for current GAPS guidance. Second, the newer book requires nut and seed flours to be fermented before baking. Soaking and drying nuts alone does not complete that newer flour-preparation step.^[2]

These distinctions let you use the cookbook’s culinary ideas while keeping the current program beside you. My Gut and Physiology Syndrome review explains that book’s wider purpose, and the Intro versus Full GAPS guide helps you compare the starting approaches.

What the Preparation Involves

This collection rewards a little reading ahead. Some meals have a short method, but others depend on an ingredient you need to culture, soak, chill, or prepare first. Several dehydrated snacks take many hours. Choosing one of those recipes when you need food in half an hour would make the book feel harder to use than it needs to be.^[1]

The opening equipment list calls the tools helpful rather than required. That is a useful distinction. Read the method for the dish you want before deciding that you need another appliance. Some preparations need a blender, food processor, yogurt maker, or dehydrator; some provide an alternative. You can begin with recipes suited to the equipment you have.

Ingredient fit deserves the same attention. Eggs, nuts, coconut, and cultured dairy appear often, especially in baking and snacks. There are alternatives in particular recipes, but the collection does not provide a substitute for every restriction. If you need a very narrow menu, check the dishes that would actually serve that need rather than judging by the total range.

The absence of bean recipes is also worth knowing. Boynton explains that she had not yet brought beans and legumes into her family’s recipe collection. That is a gap in this cookbook’s repertoire, not a statement that GAPS excludes every legume. If legume-based meals are what you are looking for, this book will not supply that collection.^[1]

Who I Recommend It For

I recommend The Heal Your Gut Cookbook most strongly to someone who has read the GAPS guidance and wants more confidence choosing and preparing meals. Its strongest contribution is the way useful foundations carry into a broad kitchen: stock, cultured ingredients, sauces, and nut or coconut preparations become meals with different flavors and textures.

It is a good fit if you are willing to cook from scratch, repeat a few basic preparations, and read ahead before starting a recipe. It is less suited to someone looking for a ready-made daily meal schedule or a book devoted to the newer No-Plant, Ketogenic, or More-Plant GAPS variations. Its practical focus is Intro and Full GAPS cooking.

To begin using that approach, choose one foundation and two meals that use it. You could start with my chicken meat stock recipe, then look through the cookbook’s soup and cooked-meat ideas for foods you have already introduced. My GAPS pantry guide and freezer-meals guide can help you organize the ingredients and finished portions.

If that is the kind of cooking help you need, you can find the cookbook in my Amazon GAPS book collection. For the different jobs of the other books I discuss on WFLI, start with my GAPS books and coaching-kit guide.

References

1. Boynton, H., and Brackett, M. G. The Heal Your Gut Cookbook: Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Intestinal Health Using the GAPS Diet. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014. Authors’ Note; “Before You Begin the GAPS Diet”; “Essential Ingredients and Techniques”; Intro stage chapters; “Salad Dressing Basics”; “Nut Pulp”; “Where Are the Beans?”; meat, condiment, snack, and dessert recipes discussed above. Publisher’s book page.
2. Campbell-McBride, N. Gut and Physiology Syndrome. Medinform Publishing, 2020. “Implementing the GAPS Introduction Diet”; “The Full GAPS Diet”; “Meat Stock and Soups.” Official book page.