S8E33: Modifying ethnic and family recipes with Jack McNulty

Jack McNulty (00:00)

I wanted to do something more than just create recipes. I wanted to really start to explore childhood memories, growing up with food that I really loved, and seeing, could I recreate those memories?

 

Geoff (00:13)

Welcome to the latest edition of Living Well with MS podcast. This is another Ask Jack episode. And for those of you who are joining us for this series, I want to welcome back Jack McNulty, the resident overcoming MS chef.

 

Overcoming MS (00:27)

Just a quick note to say that all opinions are those of the guest and do not constitute medical advice.

 

Geoff (00:35)

For those who are new to this, Jack, could you remind everyone what’s your food story and how did MS change your relationship with cooking and food?

 

Jack McNulty (00:46)

Well, first of all, nice to see you again, Geoff It’s good to be back. Boy, I think we’ve done maybe about fifteen of these now. So they’re always entertaining and I’m looking forward to today. for those that don’t know, my journey with OMS started in two thousand nine. initially switching my diet was relatively easy because I come from a cooking background obviously as a chef. I just looked at OMS as sort of a challenge worth taking on. obviously there were some benefits which were my goal. but I was also really excited and sort of interested to just re-engage with food.

 So this was just an opportunity for me to just sort of reevaluate what I was cooking, how I was cooking, how I was eating, all of those sorts of things, how I was tasting. and I found that as the years went on, I realized, I wanted to do something more than just create recipes. I wanted to really start to explore memories, you know, childhood memories, growing up with food that I just really loved, and seeing, you know, based on what I learned, could I recreate those memories?

Could I recreate that kind of food and make it compliant with OMS? And so that just became really interesting. It sort of took it to a deeper human level, I think. And that was something I really appreciate. I suspect that there’s a lot of folks out there that have been with OMS for a while that that sort of follow that same trajectory with the time. Eventually you kind of want to embrace the foods that you’ve enjoyed in your childhood or stimulate a memory or some cultural connection or family connection. and it’s nice to figure out how to do that.

 

Geoff (02:31)

Yeah, think like diet’s a big thing for people. I would say that most people would think of Overcoming MS as a diet primarily, although we know that it’s so much more than that and diet is just one of the pillars, but it’s clearly the most noticeable. But I think even when you’re doing it, you notice it more than anything else. Because I think, I mean, they say comfort food, don’t they? Food is something that can give you comfort and it’s important to be comfortable with food. So.

How do you think that sort of idea that you can still be comfortable with food when your diet changes from what you were used to growing up?

 

Jack McNulty (03:11)

Yeah, it’s an interesting question and it’s actually one of the more interesting aspects of the whole journey, in my opinion. And I think for those you know, people come to OMS in various states of acceptance. When you first confronted with OMS, a lot of people tend to look at how restrictive everything must feel. I can’t do this, I can’t eat that, blah, blah, blah. but I think that food, you know, because we confront it multiple times daily, is just one of those things that you have to find a way to get a little bit more comfortable with it. to adjust a little bit and maybe finding ways to make or enjoy foods that you were used to growing up or that have some sort of special connection is a way that can sort of speed up that acceptance. and being able to eat that recognizable food, I think that really helps in terms of developing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, something that’s going to last for a long period of time. yeah, it it’s up to the individual, that’s kind of a cop out to say, well everybody is different and everybody has to do it and find their own way. True. but I think that there are some ways and things to learn along the way that can help speed that process up in terms of finding that acceptance or that comfort.

 

Geoff (04:37)

So what’s the process that you’d go through? you’ve got a recipe that has childhood memories for you that you really want to, and there was one for me, I live in the southwest of England and there’s these things called pasties, which if you’re from the UK, you’d be familiar with. They’re traditionally from Cornwall. I live in Devon.

But I really wanted to recreate these. So that was my first sort of thing. I need to be able to make these things. But how would your process go to say, I’ve got this thing that was a real comfort food for me. I want to convert it. I mean, do you use the internet? How do you convert those recipes?

 

Jack McNulty (05:18)

Yeah, that’s a that’s actually that kind of gets right at the crux of everything, doesn’t it? You know, the easy thing to do these days is to head to the computer, you know, and just punch in a few questions and see what the computer spits out in terms of an answer. and usually it’s ingredient related, you know. If it has meat, think about tofu or tempeh or whatever or mushrooms. If it has dairy, you know, there are plenty of choices for that and it’s usually something as recommended. But it’s always this sort of ingredient swap, which is the starting point of most things that appear on the internet or even in books that you might read. But I think that there are some pitfalls to that. I actually think the beginning to begin with the ingredient is the wrong place.

To begin. I think, especially if you’re talking about a family recipe, a family recipe carries something beyond flavor or taste. It carries that memory, you know, perhaps remembering a particular age you’re at, a sense of belonging, that sort of thing. And those are, in my opinion, major ingredients in their own right. The internet can’t duplicate that particular ingredient. That’s something that comes internally. It’s something that needs to be addressed before addressing the actual physical ingredients. But I think it’s also an opportunity to build on something that lasts. If you can find a way to recreate that feeling in the food that’s going to help that dish become something meaningful.

 It will have a different sort of purpose. For instance with your pasty example. What was it about a pasty that that you wanted to make or recreate? It was the memory. It was probably going to the beach or something, wasn’t it?

Geoff (07:07)

Well yeah, there is that. It’s normally by the beach because it’s covered in pastries. I mean they do ones which are vegan so I wasn’t always having ones which are meat based. Traditionally it would be beef with vegetables wrapped up in pastry so it’s something you can travel with. You can eat it at the beach memories aside of it.

 

Jack McNulty (07:33)

It’s essentially just a handheld pie. So you know, beyond the ingredients, so the filling ingredients are something to look at, but then the pastry ingredients, how do you get around all those sorts of issues? But even before that, what you really wanted to create was having that that pie in your hand and eating it that would stimulate that memory from earlier in your life that’s how I’m referring to that particular memory as an ingredient aspect.

 

Geoff (08:05)

So if people are doing that sort of thing and they’ve got a particular meal and we said we can’t go, it’s because everyone’s meals will be different. There’ll be something that triggers their childhood memories. So if we could talk about specific substitutions, so what would be your go-to dairy and meat substitutions and what do people often get wrong when substituting?

 

Jack McNulty (08:30)

This is the beginning of the deconstruction process, right? So in my opinion, I think that the most important thing to do when looking at the ingredient level. First of all, before that, before we even get to that point, I think it’s just really very, very clear in my mind that the first question out of your head should be, what am I trying to recreate? So is it trying to recreate a memory or some connection? Or is it just really trying to create a dish that has specific ingredient you’re trying to replace? So with the ingredient aspect, once you get beyond that first question, the ingredient that I think the problem that most people have is they just they look to swap out the ingredient based on information they may have read on the internet somewhere or in a book somewhere. you know, you use a flax egg as an egg replacement, as a catch-all for all egg replacement. Well that’s simply not going to work because an egg has multiple functions. and so I think that that’s the first point asking yourself what’s the function of this ingredient? What is this ingredient actually doing in the recipe? And I think it’s really worth those few seconds or minutes to just kind of go through it and ask that question before going to the supermarket and finding, you know, replacements on the shelf or just accepting what a book or internet may have suggested, let’s put it that way.

So I think questioning the function of the ingredient helps select the right example. So maybe you’re trying to replace something that’s binding or adding richness or creating some sort of savory mommy’s type taste. and or maybe texture plays a role in what you’re trying to create in your mouth. And so if you go through any recipe in a book or internet source or in a family collection somewhere. And you look at that ingredient list first. That just break it up and just look at it and question all of those ingredients. So for instance, if milk is there, ask the question, why is it there? And what can I use to replace it? Is it there just to offer liquid in the recipe? In which case, well that’s a no-brainer. You can just use water you know as a very simple example.

Maybe the milk is there to add some kind of richness. Okay, so we know milk has higher levels of fat depending on the kind of milk people would have in their recipe, or protein. So you just look for your dairy-free milk that you want to replace it with to have a higher level of protein or perhaps a higher level of fat. So, for instance, soy milk is much richer than almond milk.

So in in that particular case, soy milk would probably function much better than almond milk or even these days there’s so many barista versions, you know, which are much thicker. And they may actually function much better in in some of the recipes if you’re trying to replace something like that.

 

Geoff (11:40)

And what about, Milk, yeah, not too bad, but butter is quite a tricky one.

And I’d say another one would be eggs.

 

Jack McNulty (11:48)

Yeah, eggs will always be the big problem because eggs have many different roles in cooking. And so you really have to try to understand what is the egg actually doing in that recipe. It could be binding, it could be adding some degree of leavening, it could be adding richness. and so oftentimes the replacement for egg is going to be multiple things. It won’t be just a single thing that’s going to offer that replacement for egg.

 

Butter is interesting as well because butter and cooking actual not baking, just cooking something is relatively simple to replace. because mostly when a recipe says, okay, put the butter in the pan and melt it. Well, why not just use oil? It’s already in a melted state.

You know, so then i it becomes a little bit easier when you look at it that way. You just have to understand that most butter is eighty to eighty-two percent fat. And so you basically do the equation in your head and just say, Well, I’m not gonna use a one-to-one substitution. I’ll use that same amount in weight with oil, but only about eighty percent of it or something like that, if the fat is even that important. I think that in many cases what happens is you find that butter, we’re so used to butter in recipes that it overtakes flavors. It just becomes dominant in certain recipes. And using things like oil, if you choose to use fat, it just makes the whole dish taste much cleaner. And you’ll discover, that was something I’d never tasted in that version of whatever I was making before. It came out better. It tasted better. It tasted cleaner. And so that that works a little bit better. In terms of baking, you have to be a little bit more selective and understanding well what’s butter doing, you know, and how does it work in a cake recipe, for instance? What’s the function that it’s trying to do there? Is it often a whipping case where you’re whipping the sugar and butter together and kind of doing the creaming method. but there’s ways around that these days in baking. There’s so many really interesting ideas in in baking, that butter becomes almost secondary in thought. Now the one thing that you can struggle with, which I’m still struggling with, is trying to figure out how to make an adequate puff pastry, you know, which relies on the butter for steam, that sort of thing. And so that’s something I’ve tried and failed a few times. I’m working on it.

 

Geoff (14:16)

Yeah, the closest I come is using multiple layers of filo pastry and then if you put some oil in between, a light amount of oil in between each layer of filo, then it kind of does somewhat do that.

 

Jack McNulty (14:30)

Yeah. But it but this is what I was referring to. This is the cool thing about OMS is when you get to this point of wow, I’m trying to create, you know, like a vegan puff pastry. Who would have thought I would be doing that seventeen years ago? but it’s really fascinating because you get into the kind of the weeds of the whole thing on cooking and understanding how does puff pastry work in the first place and so what am I gonna need to do? How do I try to create that? And then you experiment and you fail and you experiment again and that was really fairly close, but then you try to recreate it and it fails and you know, and y you’re just going along at that pace and eventually you’ll get there. But in the meantime you’ve already created so many other interesting things to eat that it becomes fun.

 

Overcoming MS (15:20)

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Geoff (15:34)

And there are things that are accidentally vegan like filo pastry I was saying when I looked at the pack of that was like wow, that’s there’s really hardly anything in here I mean, it’s like a 10th of a millimeter thick or something. It’s ridiculously.

 

Jack McNulty (15:46)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, mostly what it is. whereas strudel dough will have a little bit of usually a kind of acid like vinegar in it that helps it stretch out a bit.

 

Geoff (15:56)

And so you talk about the feeling of a dish. So what do you mean by that in practice? What does the feeling of a dish mean?

 

Jack McNulty (16:06)

Yeah, that’s kind of the core of the discussion today, sort of the spine of everything that we’re trying to discuss. I think it’s just very, very important to be able to ask yourself, what are we all what are we trying to recreate? This I’ve mentioned this before, this frames everything in terms of determining what your ingredient choices are going to be. So the feeling of the dish is that sense of what it brings you once you eat it, once it’s made and once you eat it, that sense of enjoyment. Where is that coming from?

 And then reassembling the ingredient choices. I think that’s sort of the next step. Once you understand what are you trying to recreate, is then just take the ingredient list and go through each one and ask what’s the function of it. Many times you’ll find in many recipes on the internet or in books or whatever they’re just ingredients that are in recipes that it’s like, why is that there? And you ask that question and you don’t have an answer. And you’ll find that maybe it’s not even necessary to be there. Which has happened many times, and so that that can happen. and then the method would be the next issue to address, the cooking methods. you know, it’s always in my mind going to follow a particular path to try to get that feeling of a recipe. The purpose, the ingredients, the cooking methods, what are the alternatives, and in your mind understanding what, if any, are the trade-offs that you might want to make. What are the compromises that might need to be made? Not compromises in health, but compromises perhaps in taste or texture or something like this, even cost, certainly that comes into play as well. I just like to look at the result and then ask the obvious question afterwards, you know, did it work? Was it authentic? So for me that’s the feeling of the recipe. If it worked, that’s fantastic. If it’s authentic, fantastic.

I’ll give you an example. My wife is Swiss in recreating sort of family recipes. So I come from a Moroccan background, and I can discuss some Moroccan ideas I’ve had, but I also want to try to recreate things from my wife’s memories and childhood, that sort of thing. and so being Swiss, there’s some obvious challenges living in a land of dairy and eggs and cheese and all of these sorts of things. So I wanted to maybe pursue what some would consider the ultimate challenge is how would I make a fondue and make it vegan and make it acceptable to eat in an OMS sort of way. so I thought about that and I thought I know these days there are you can just go to the supermarket, especially in Switzerland, and you can buy vegan fondue mixes.

 

Geoff (19:08)

So before we start, because this just sounds impossible to me, because this is a global audience, just to explain what fondue is.

 

Jack McNulty (19:17)

I’m talking about cheese fondue in Switzerland. So it’s gonna have a mixture of different cheeses that’ll be melted, usually with some wine involved, and a little bit of cornstarch to help thicken it and keep it thick. And it’s put into a pot with a little bit of a like a candle underneath it to keep it at a certain temperature, and it’s a very much of a participant kind of eating experience where you’re dipping, usually in Switzerland it’s little cubes of bread that are dipped into the melted cheese mix, and then you eat it. So the interesting aspect when you really get down to the question of well, what’s the purpose? Why would I want to do that? What am I trying to create? What’s the feeling in the fondue? Well, the feeling is obviously that dipping into this melted sort of cheesy mix and eating it with just bread or potato or whatever. And it should have a certain degree of cheese flavor. You should have it kind of in a consistency that’s similar to like a cheese fondue. But what’s really interesting with cheese fondue, when you’ve had it on the fire for a while and you get down towards the bottom, the bits on the bottom, the cheese on the bottom always creates a crust on the bottom of the pot. And that was the experience. That’s what everybody wants to eat, and so if you buy a supermarket vegan fondue, you’re not gonna have that crust. That’s just not gonna happen.

And when you try to create something like I did using vegetable, I used cauliflower as well as some other things, I thought, well, the crust is really part of the experience. That’s what I really wanted to try to create was that feeling. And so I just kind of came up with a way of creating a crust that would sit on the bottom of that fondue. And I made it actually with sort of this crusty tofu mixture where I just drained and grated tofu and then mix it with some olive oil and some lemon and a little bit of yeast extract and some flour to kind of hold it together. And then I found that if you just fry that in a dry pan, it turns into this sort of crispy cheesy concoction that was pretty startling to me. And so I just put that at the bottom of the pan. Now it wasn’t identical.

But having made that fondue experience, it was fun to get to the bottom and go, look at here, look at what we got here, a little a little crusty.

 

Geoff (21:43)

So you could still dip the bread into it.

 

Jack McNulty (21:47)

Yeah. Yeah, it did. I gotta, you know, just admittedly it wasn’t my greatest achievement by any means. It was a fun, decent experiment and I shared it with my wife. We had a few laughs about it. We enjoyed the crusty bit. I think I’ve made it maybe two or three times since but that’s a that’s an example of the feeling and why the feeling is important.

The things that you can buy on the supermarket shelf, especially in the baking world where everything these days or recipe books are on the internet or whatever.

And you know, ninety-nine percent of the time it’s gonna come back with some kind of vegan butter or coconut oil, coconut fat, that’s clearly not compliant with what we’re trying to do. So it’s just it becomes a frustrating experience more than anything, if you don’t actually go out and take the trouble to learn a little bit more about what are the other alternatives, what are the other options.

 

Geoff (22:45)

And so did you have recipe conversions that didn’t work and how do you deal with that?

 

Jack McNulty (22:52)

That’s part of the process is allowing the room for failure and to learn from that.

One of my favorite recipes I can remember from my Moroccan side is these things called burek. And it’s similar to, your idea of pasty. So these are made with phylo, like we were talking about earlier. And they’re little triangles that my mother made all the time. And they always had some kind of meat, usually beef or lamb in it, filled with parsley and lots and lots of different Moroccan spices. And they were just addictive. I could probably eat twenty of those little things in one sitting but that was something that really always stayed with me. That was just a family thing I always loved. and I wanted to recreate it. So the question was why what did I want to try to achieve? Maybe I was trying to get a little closer to the memory of my mom or the memory of that food, that sort of thing. I really wanted to have that sort of that meal again. And I wanted to share that actually with my wife. I wanted to share it one time with my brother who was visiting because he had that same experience. And so I wanted to try to make it compliant within the OMS world. And I don’t know how I came up with the filling. I can’t remember, but somehow I came across some sort of odd mixture of using Swiss chard and tahini and roasted walnuts. And when I made it, I thought, that’s really interesting because it came out a little bit dry. It came out sort of meaty and really tasty. And I thought immediately I’m gonna try to put these into this phyllo pie.

The next question then would be the phyllo because phyllo typically, you know, was coated with a lot of butter and my mom used to always fry them rather than bake them. And I, you know, that was the cooking method aspect. So I thought, well they don’t need to be fried. I can just bake these and certainly don’t need to use butter because the first thing I say is melt the butter and then coat the phyllo sheets. So why not just use oil? Which is what I did. And when I did that, I mean the phyllo turned out great.

The filling not so much, you learn little things, there was a little too much moisture and so the phyllo pies kind of broke open with the steam that was in it was a little bit disappointing and the consistency wasn’t quite right. And so I fiddled with it a little bit. I finally got it to the point where I was like, these are really good. These are the same thing. You know, it’s really close. It’s not it’s not identical.

I knew it would never be identical, but it served its purpose. It brought me right back to the memory of, what I was trying to recreate. And so that’s why, yeah, of course you you’re gonna have the failures, but that’s really part of the fun. It gets you even closer, I think, to the memory and to the food when you allow yourself the room to make those mistakes.

 

Geoff (25:41)

And for people who are just beginning, if they’ve just, they’re newly diagnosed or they just come to OMS, what would be your recommendations?

 

Jack McNulty (25:50)

Yeah, the memory experiences are just the most important ingredient. Just always keep that in your mind, you know, and on anything that you’re trying to replicate. That’s the most important ingredient. Once you get there, figure out how to address the ingredients. And that’s gonna take a little bit of work. That’s gonna take a little bit of understanding as to how something works in a recipe or an ingredient. But that’s easy information to find out these days, you know, it’s really simple to go on a search or to find some kind of book or to ask someone asks a question as to how you know what does this particular ingredient do in a recipe. And once you get to that point, then you put together your ingredient list, you look at the cooking methods, you decide, you know, geez, does this really need to be baked in the oven, or can I use an air fryer for this and achieve the same thing?

Figure out what’s working best for you and in your situation and with your particular family. and finally, just always ask at the end, you know, how did it turn out? Was it authentic? Write down the notes. I find that I do that all the time.

With everything I make, I just kinda write down quickly on the piece of paper on the recipe, you know, what version it was. I put a date on it, a version number on it, and I said what worked and what didn’t work, so that next time I want to make it, I have that reference point. and I can make some changes and then make the next note. And you’re always building this little iteration of your recipe. So the first recipes will never be a hundred percent correct If they aren’t, just move on. try it the next.

What’s your experience been Geoff? Because you cook a lot on that.

 

Geoff (27:30)

Yeah, basically you don’t want to have too many meals. There’s no point in having 200 different meals as a family. You don’t want to eat the same thing every week, but equally I think if you’ve got maybe like a month’s worth of recipes at the most and then you’ll probably roll back through those. Then each time we eat a particular meal, if there’s anything that needs changing, and that’s probably nowadays not an OMS thing, it’s probably due to my daughter liking less chili than I do. I put chili in most things, to be honest.

 

Jack McNulty (28:02)

Yeah. I I’m the same way, my wife doesn’t like it either. So we have to build very module modular dishes.

 

Geoff (28:07)

Or another one, there was a really nice Moroccan dish actually we did the other night where, and that is something, Morocco was the first place I went to outside Europe. So it has a lot of memories of me, I went with my wife as she is now. It was our first sort of big trip travelling. And it was very lamb based food.

That was sort of the memory. then I thought actually, it was actually more than lamb. It was apricots. I’ve never had apricots in a savoury meal before that trip. This is back in the sort of mid nineties and we hadn’t experienced that. so for me adding apricots and I think it’s Ras el Hanout spice Mix.

But they sell it in supermarkets from the main spice vendors. So if you add that and you’ve got like harissa paste and you’ve got the apricots, then that actually brought back the memories. So I think, yeah, it’s working out what was it. And it wasn’t actually the lamb. It was actually what was with the lamb. I’ve got written on that now actually, that it comes out as more of a soup than it’s quite liquidy.

So serve it with some bread. So things like that. And then the way we do it, that card then goes to the bottom and then they just sort of rotate round. And then we’re like, okay, next week’s food, what we’re eating, we just go through, okay, well, let’s have a look at the next five or six cards. Do they work for what we’re doing next week? and you have to be adaptable as well. Last night was a big football game in England. So we had pizza.

 

because it was 5pm which was a bad time to have a football match to try and eat. So pizzas are quick, once you’ve prepared them they just go in the oven for 10 minutes. So you have to be flexible. But I think you’re right, was that workout, what was it that gave you that memory?

 

Jack McNulty (30:00)

There’s always the the question that I get as well, there was no cheese in the dish and I missed that. You know which is a very legitimate comment. You know, and I would tend to ask the question then, well what part of that cheese are you missing? What is it with that cheese that you’re craving at this moment? Is it the texture? You know, is it the flavor of that particular cheese? Is it the interplay with the other ingredients, the way it might be melting? You know, what is it that you’re actually missing about that particular ingredient? And a lot of times when you ask that question, or go deep with that question, you kind of realize, you know, what is it that I’m actually missing? And it frames it differently in the mind. And you just think, well it’s the creaminess. Well is there a way to create that creaminess without using the cheese that would be OMS compliant? You know, that would be the next step or the next question and and try to go that way and build on that.

 

Geoff (31:06)

Yeah, or Michael Greger does a really good plant-based parmesan equivalent. Nutty Parm, I think he calls it. And that works really well. It’s got the, texture, that flavor that parmesan adds to food. There are some things you can’t do.

But, I mean, I saying pizza, pizza without cheese is really nice. Once you get used to it,

 

Jack McNulty (31:26)

Yeah. The same thing is just with something as simple as mashed potatoes, you know, a potato puree. Which we’re, so accustomed to just putting so much butter in it and especially if you happen to be in France, you know, it’s just it’s butter with a little bit of potato seasoning really. We strip that butter out.

And you know, maybe use a different kind of fat if you choose to, you start to taste the potato differently. You know, as long as you can get the consistency right and you just realize, geez, that’s what a potato tastes like. That’s what the mashed potatoes that tastes better. You know, you taste the maybe the nutmeg in it and you taste the seasoning a little bit differently. because butter does is the same as cheese in the sense that it just masks everything else as you said.

 

Geoff (32:16)

So if people want to take that a bit further, where could listeners find out more about what you do and more about your work?

 

Jack McNulty (32:24)

I spend most of my time writing about food these days. And my passion really is just trying to figure out how to make food taste good and using, ingredients and I focus my writing on vegan foods, but I really keep everything healthy, with a real careful watch on that. So I write about it a lot. I do have a newsletter on Substack called Vegan Weekly for those that might be interested. If you want to join it’s free to get most of the information. and I’m always happy to hear from anybody that lands on that page and wants to ask a question. So that’s where you can find

 

Geoff (33:03)

And with that, thank you very much for joining us, Jack McNulty.

 

Jack McNulty (33:05)

Thanks, Geoff.

 

Gina (33:07)

You can read the show notes for this episode at overcoming ms.org slash podcast, join our newsletter at overcoming ms.org slash newsletter, or send us a question at podcast at overcomingms.org. All links are in the description.