S3E10 Ask Jack: cooking tips and recipe ideas

Jack McNulty  00:06

Hi, I’m Jack McNulty a professional chef, and serious OMS foodie. Welcome to Ask Jack, a special Living Well with MS podcast series, where I’ll be answering food and cooking related questions submitted by you; our Overcoming MS community.

Geoff Allix  00:24

If you’d like to submit a question for a future episode of Ask Jack, please email us at [email protected] that’s [email protected]. And now, let’s rev up our appetites and dig into this episode. Welcome to our second installment of Ask Jack featuring the prodigious culinary talents of professional holistic chef Jack McNulty answering food-related questions generated by you, our community. Check out the show notes below that dig deeper into the topics covered in this episode. Ask Jack Number 3 premieres on July 21, 2021, just in time to get great cooking tips for the summer, at least for our listeners in the northern hemisphere. Don’t forget to submit your questions for Ask Jack by emailing them to [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please consider registering at www.overcomingms.org this way you can stay up to date on all the latest OMS news including new programs and digital initiatives. Again, that’s www.overcomingms.org and look for the register button in the top right hand corner of your screen. Now onto this episode’s topics and questions. So welcome, Jack.

Jack McNulty  01:37

Thanks, Geoff. It’s great to be back for another exciting episode of Ask Jack.

Geoff Allix  01:43

To start with today we’re going to start with the topic of what shall I eat? Which is a fairly broad topic, potentially. And first we have a question from Annemieke, I hope I pronounced that correctly, in the Netherlands about peanuts. And it’s quite a big topic but for quite a small thing, in Dutch cooking and in much cooking actually worldwide, but in Dutch cooking specifically, peanut butter sauce is quite common. To make the saurce, you use peanut butter, in stores 100% peanut butter from raw peanuts is available and it’s unprocessed, but the OMS website says that peanuts are defined as a ground nut that’s a nut from the ground, rather than one that has been ground up and not recommended due to their high saturated fat content. Some people replace peanut butter with sunflower butter, tahini, sesame seed butter, cashew butter, or almond butter or a mixture of those. But I’m confused about the saturated fat and Omega 3 or Omega 6 content of these different nuts and seeds versus peanuts. Jack, is it really a problem to have some peanut butter from 100% raw peanuts, since we can also eat tahini, sunflower seeds and cashew nuts?

Jack McNulty  03:04

What a great question to get us started. So yeah, it is an involved question. There’s actually quite a lot to that question that we can dive into versus the idea of peanuts, are they really safe to eat on the OMS diet as opposed to other nuts? Then there’s the question of saturated fats, Omega 6 versus Omega 3, then there’s the whole concept of nut butters that we can dive into. And finally, there’s the whole idea of foods that have some sort of cultural significance and if they play a role in our diet or something we should consider. So let’s take a look at that.

Geoff Allix  03:46

A peanut is not actually a nut, is it?

Jack McNulty  03:49

Exactly. So peanut is a legume, It’s an underground legume. So it would be the same as a soybean or something like this. It’s just grown underground as opposed to on a tree. That’s why it’s called the ground nut as opposed to a tree nut, but it technically is not really a nut. So the makeup of a peanut is very similar to many of the other nuts in terms of the fat content, in terms of protein, in terms of fiber, all of these aspects of the nuts. So a peanut will have roughly 48% fat, about 30% of which is Omega 6, which as we know is inflammatory producing, as opposed to Omega 3 which reduces inflammation. There is a relatively high caloric load when it comes to peanuts as there is with all nuts, so it’s something that we should all take into consideration in terms of any nut that you’re eating. There’s about 17 grams of fat or so per ounce, which is around 30 grams. That’s sort of mid range, I suppose in terms of comparing to all nuts, macadamia nuts and pecans are the highest at 21 and 22 grams per fat, respectively. But the biggest problem with peanuts that may lead to some sort of confusion that’s out there, is the fact that because it’s grown under ground, they are susceptible to moulds and pesticides. So there’s a particular kind of toxin called aflatoxin, which can be a cancer causing property and a lot of people say that, you know, eating too many peanuts are going to give you a problem. Well, this is true, but there are some things to take into consideration. First of all, when peanuts are roasted about 80% of those toxins are gone, they disappear, which is helpful because most peanut butter is going to be made from roasted peanut. So a lot of people are gonna say, Well, what about the fact that they roast them in oils? But that’s not always true, because a lot of the peanuts are actually roasted naturally in their shell rather than tossed in some kind of oil. If they are tossed in an oil, that oil has to be listed in the ingredients, so you can always double check that. If eating just peanuts on their own, you can also sort of just visually take a check, so if there is a mould on it, it’s going to discolor the peanut, it will make it darker. So darker peanuts are generally things that you want to throw away, or a really shriveled peanut, sometimes you get those you crack open a shell or something, you have a peanut that’s very shriveled, just toss that away, that’s probably going to have some mould on it. So that’s the first thing to look at, is peanuts in general compared to other nuts, probably not any worse than any other nut in terms of fat content, there are some benefits with fiber and protein and certainly a lot of vitamins in peanuts. So on a whole, If you keep your consumption to say a handful or so several times a week, that’s perfectly fine. The handful is going to be about an ounce about 30 grams or so, so i’m not talking about a lot, but if you need a little peanut fix having a little bit is perfectly okay. In terms of saturated fat, peanuts are roughly comparable to other nuts so is around two grams of saturated fat per ounce. So that handful is going to contribute about two grams of saturated fat. For most other nuts, almonds, walnuts, things like that, you’re going to be one to one and a half grams. So it’s not a huge increase, it is a slight increase, but certainly not two or three times more than other types of tree nuts. Now when things get interesting is when you start looking at nut butters. So nut butters; cashew nut, almond nut, walnut, and certainly peanut butter is all going to be around 80 to 100 calories per tablespoon, which is a pretty high level of calorie intake and about 7 to 10 grams of fat. So you’re going to want to manage how much nut butter you’re actually consuming. On the whole a nut butter is in itself not going to be a huge problem on the OMS diet. Where you’re going to run into issues is if you have that tendency to take one spoonful of peanut butter and say ‘My goodness, that tasted good, let me have another one’ and that goes into a third one, and then you do that the next day and the following day. That’s where the problem is going to exist, is that overconsumption, but certainly one to two tablespoons here and there is not going to be a huge issue and I think that the idea of using peanut butter is not going to be any different than tahini which is made from sesame if you’re not familiar with that or it’s not going to be any different than consuming almond butter or cashew butter at about the same rate; not very often, but helpful in certain things. And I think we’re going to come to the topic of nut butters again a little bit later, probably with some some other questions that may come up.

Geoff Allix  09:52

Okay, so maybe, I mean talking about Dutch cooking because they have a lot of Indonesian influences from colonial times, so a satay sauce; is where you might get problems that you’ve just got too much?

 

Jack McNulty  10:09

Exactly and so this is that whole idea of cultural influences and I think that this is an important topic to talk about a little bit and to kind of dive into. Sometimes I think, in my opinion, I think it’s important to go ahead and eat some of these foods occasionally, not overdoing it, to go ahead and make a standard Dutch satay peanut sauce with your meal, and enjoy it, because it gives you a sense of belonging, you know, if you start cutting too many things out, which I think it’s one of the great things about OMS is very inclusive in a lot of respects, but if you cut to many things out it’s going to give you stress, it’s going to make you feel like “oh, you know, you’re sick, you can’t have this, you can’t have that.” Whereas if you do it every once in a while, you know, in a managed situation, it’s probably not the worst thing that you can do for yourself. And I think it’s really important also to limit going out in a restaurant, and having these kinds of foods because you lose control over the other ingredients. So if you’re making a satay sauce or something like this with peanut butter, do it in your home, they’re very simple to make and if you use a tablespoon of peanut butter to make a sauce for four to six servings or something, you’re not going to have a huge amount of fat increase, and it will make a difference from a family perspective I’m sure.

 

Geoff Allix  11:45

Okay, thank you. So next question from Kiril in Bulgaria. I’ve been told to say the slippery topic of oils; on the topic of oils, so we’ve talked about different oils before this one specifically talking about grape seed oil rather than rape seed oil, is it okay for to use for baking?

Jack McNulty  12:14

Okay, yeah, it’s a good question. I do like your concept of oil slicks, you know, the slippery topic. First of all, grapeseed oil is a waste product, it’s made from a waste product. So it’s made from the pressing of grapes, either for wine or for juice, and the strained out bit is going to give you the grape seed, so it’s a cheap starting material. Grapeseed oil and grape seeds themselves are extremely high in Omega 6 and about 70% or so have no Omega 3 in them, they don’t really have a huge benefit in terms of nutrition in the oil, so there’s nothing really there that is health promoting, or even neutral from that perspective. Everything it seems to be a little bit more on the downside when it comes to grapeseed oil. So I would ask the question, why would you? There are plenty of alternatives when it comes to wanting to use an oil, in baking for instance, you can turn to an unprocessed rapeseed oil or extra virgin olive oil, or in many instances and in fact, in most instances, you can eliminate the oil all together which is probably going to be your best option.

 

Geoff Allix  13:40

Okay. From Nick in Lincoln, Rhode Island, US, we have a question which is coming up a lot at the moment about plant based meat alternatives, so he’s asking; Jack are impossible burgers, okay for people with MS who want to follow an anti inflammatory diet and also Impossible Burgers being a brand, there are other ones: Beyond Meat burgers, and there are many when we look in the supermarket now locally in UK certainly, there’s a whole selection not just of a traditional veggie burger, which I take to be actually vegetables in the shape of a burger. These are fake meats or meats they’ve made to look like meat so these sorts of meat alternative burgers are these okay?

Jack McNulty  14:34

Yeah, that’s really a tremendous question and thank you Nick for asking it. Boy, I was just in a supermarket the other day and I was really really surprised to see how much these types of foods are expanding in the supermarket aisles. So where I was there was meat alternatives to chicken, veal, burgers, sausages, you name it, It’s all available now. The question becomes is it really something you want to consider eating? And it’s really an important topic in fact, I think we’ll talk about that a little bit later, but the next episode of Ask Jack, we’re gonna go into detail on that and make that a particular theme but we’ll touch on that a little bit later. But back to your question, Nick. In terms of the Impossible Burger, let’s just start there. If you go to their website, and you look for the ingredients of an Impossible Burger, you’ll find that they’re made with water, soya protein concentrate, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors, potato protein, soya hemoglobin and the soya protein isolate. So there are a lot of processed elements when it comes to making an Impossible Burger. Some of those have been shown to maybe have some digestive problems, especially with the soya hemoglobin, which is unique to the Impossible Burger, and it gives the Impossible Burger, this sort of bleeding sensation, that’s what that is. But some people have reported that they cramp up, they have a lot of issues with digestion after eating an Impossible Burger. So I would ask the question to Nick in return, or anybody else considering eating an Impossible Burger, Are you doing this or wanting to do this out of pure curiosity? Which is fine, sometimes it’s interesting to see what’s out there. But it could be safer to eat a real burger in this case than something made with those ingredients. Are you wanting to do this because of being invited to a barbecue or some sort of family get together, where you having what I call crossover foods, people can eat everything, and maybe you want to have something that’s vegan, and everybody can take part in it? In which case, I would ask, are there alternatives to consider that wouldn’t have these sorts of ingredients? Or would you consider it a possibility to just simply make your own replacement in this particular case? Or a third alternative is, is this a real convenience thing? Do you want to go to your local Burger King and have a fast food Impossible Burger, where you have no control over what’s made in the buns? How that burger is actually cooked? What goes into the sauces, all of these sorts of elements. And so I think you would be really putting your health at risk by following the sort of practice of eating Impossible Burgers, probably not going to do anything if you eat one. If you make a habit out of it, I would suspect that you’re going to run into a lot of issues with it. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend it, I don’t see any upside when you look at the ingredients in the Impossible Burger as to why I would want to put that in my body.

 

Geoff Allix  18:31

It certainly goes against the whole food side of plant based whole food eating.

 

Jack McNulty  18:36

Yeah, and then you got the whole coconut issue in there as well, like coconut oil always finds its way into some of these ingredients.

 

Geoff Allix  18:47

So another question onto canned foods. A question from Duarte in Poland. What’s your view on canned legumes and fruits? Are there some to avoid, and if so which ones?

 

Jack McNulty  19:01

Yeah, Duarte, that’s also an excellent question. Sometimes it’s just great to be able to come home, you’ve had a busy day, and just say I need to eat something fairly quickly. And you just pop open a can of chickpeas or whatever you have, and mix them with some vegetables, throw everything together, maybe with some spices and whatnot have a very quick nutritious meal. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with that, I’ve done it myself. But there are some downsides to consider when you’re thinking about canned foods. And the biggest culprit in canned foods will have to do with BPA levels, the primary source for BPA in humans is with canned foods, or processed foods. So if you can eliminate canned foods and processed foods from your diet, you’re going to eliminate 90% of BPA exposure. And whatever exposure is in your body is going to drop rapidly, which is a good thing because it gets out of your body fairly quickly.

 

Geoff Allix  20:10

And what is BPA?

 

Jack McNulty  20:13

BPA is a chemical, it’s often used in making plastics. So plastic bottles, things like that. So BPA in canned foods is with the lining inside of a can and that chemical is used in those linings. So in my opinion, I think it’s best to avoid BPA cans. So if canned food is going to have low BPA, they’ll be very happy to market that and put that on their can, alternatives or look for those same ingredients, especially with sauces like tomato sauces, and things like this in glass jars rather than in cans. Or Tetra packs, Tetra packs are not going to have the same sort of BPA problem that you would experience with a can. Of course, there is another alternative and that means you could make your food fresh.

 

Geoff Allix  21:12

As a third path. How about frozen? So if I’m looking at corn, so sweetcorn. So yes, I could have it fresh, so I just want to have a potato baked in the oven, quick lunch with some corn in it and I quite often have that. So if I do it with fresh corn, that becomes quite a big cooking activity to get the corn off the cob adds time a lot of time. So my alternatives then are; I can get it from a can or I can get frozen corn and then I can reheat that. So how about the frozen as a third option? Is frozen food as bad as as canned food?

 

Jack McNulty  22:00

I’m glad you brought that up.

 

Geoff Allix  22:01

I’m sorry, this is not a proper question, this is my own question.

 

Jack McNulty  22:07

We’ll call this a question from our listener, Geoff. In this particular case, frozen foods are really good. People think and because it’s not fresh that it’s necessarily going to be as nutritious or not as tasty. Frozen foods are different, so frozen foods are often flash frozen shortly after harvest. I have some particular experience in this I used to work in a pea harvest years and years ago. And I know that when peas get harvested, they get shelled immediately through the combine or the machinery that’s taking them off the vine. And then they go quickly and by quickly I’m talking within an hour, they’re flash frozen, and then sent off to the factory for sorting and packaging and whatnot in a frozen state. So those are actually more nutritious in most cases then fresh peas, which are often going to be a week or two weeks old before you get them. So yeah, many vegetables are made this way; flash frozen at the site or shortly after harvest. I have no problem with that. I would tend to want to go more towards organic when you’re talking about frozen vegetables than your fresh vegetables.

 

Geoff Allix  23:48

Okay, thanks for that. So moving on to helpful tips and cooking techniques. From Marie in the United Kingdom a question about coconut milk replacements. She uses coconut essence and oat milk, but these don’t quite hit the mark. So is there any recommendations?

 

Jack McNulty  24:10

Hmm. Well, Marie, I’m assuming this question is being asked from the perspective of someone that likes to make a curry. All the boxes are being ticked there in terms of “I want to do something that’s going to have coconut flavour, and it’s gonna have to do some degree of thickening.” So really, there’s two parts to that question. There’s the thickening element and then there’s the flavour element. Let me just break that down for a second. So what I do on myself is I make a blend that very easy to make. I just I take 250 milliliters or about one cup of unsweetened soya milk and mix that with one tablespoon of chickpea flour and one tablespoon of nut butter and I told you we’ve come to nut butter again at some point. And I mix that up in a little mini blender and I use a little nutri bullet, I just blend it up till it’s very smooth, and I work it into the sauce or curry or whatever I’m making towards the end of the cooking and let it just kind of simmer for just a couple of minutes to thicken a little bit mood off the heat, and then you get the thickening aspect to it. So the nut butter I tend to use is something more flavorless like a cashew butter, but it’s open. So if you making a satay sauce, like they do in the Netherlands, you can use a little bit of peanut butter in this same mixture and have that same sort of experience from the thickening perspective. Now from flavour, coconut, of course, has a very distinctive flavour, one of which a lot of people really like, what you can do to add some of that coconut flavour into this mixture is simply using a little bit of coconut water in replacement of some of the soya milk, and boost that a little bit with some coconut essence also, so that’s easily purchased in most supermarkets, drop a few drops in there, be careful because that’s very synthetic. You don’t want it to taste too much like chemicals, and then just mix that together, but add that really at the end. Have those flavour elements at the end the cooking, or the heating will take away a lot of the natural flavours you’re gonna get from coconut water, or from the essence itself.

 

Geoff Allix  26:39

So coconut water that’s the liquid from inside of coconut, but coconut milk isn’t is it, coconut milk made from the meat of the coconut? And that’s the bit we need to avoid.

 

Jack McNulty  26:50

Yeah, exactly, that’s gonna have a lot more fat in it. So coconut water has no fat and it’s been stripped out. So that’s really great, it’s pretty neutral. Really It’s rather expensive because it’s a trend drink, but it’s perfectly okay on the OMS diet, because there’s no fat to really consider there and there’s nothing else that’s going to create any sort of inflammation or anything of that nature.

 

Geoff Allix  27:20

Okay, and still on the coconut theme a question from Anne in the OMS circle in Hertfordshire, UK, what are some suitable substitutes for coconut oil in vegan recipes? Unlike coconut oil, olive oil doesn’t always work due to being liquid at room temperature. So what do you think?

 

Jack McNulty  27:40

Yeah, I’m guessing that Anne is asking this question from a baking perspective. So probably that’s where the substitution is coming from. So coconut oil is often found if you go searching around very long in the internet for vegan recipes, I imagine it’s going to be something under 10 seconds before you find a recipe with coconut oil in it. It’s all over the place and in most recipes. So there’s a few things to think about on that. Anne is correct, it’s not going to function the same way as olive oil because of the different fat levels. So coconut oil is primarily saturated fat and that’s why it’s so effective and some of these recipes as a replacement for butter, the fat itself in baking is really important from the texture perspective that’s going to give you the cake like or flaky like consistency, such as if you’re making something like a pastry dough, or a cake, or a scone or muffin or something of that nature. So its texture and moisture needs to be replaced but also the aspect of what the fat does. So my recommendation on that is coconut oil is easily replaced with the usual suspects; unprocessed rapeseed oil, extra virgin olive oil, or in some cases asking yourself the question is the oil really necessary and just eliminating it. Now I’ve found that if you take your oil that you’re going to use such a for instance I do this when I make a pastry dough, with unprocessed rapeseed oil, I will use a lot less rapeseed oil and I’ll take a half or one spoonful of nut butter, and I mix it in with the oil and that creates a mixture that’s very similar to butter in that sense. It holds the oil together a little bit more and stops some of that leeching that might occur and it works quite well in terms of creating the texture. So that would be a good substitution for coconut oil.

 

Geoff Allix  30:10

Thank you and we have another question from the UK from Marie. On the subject of chips, in the UK chips would be french fries in America, so chipped potatoes if you like or french fries, she never used to eat them, but her family who also followed the OMS diet often requests them and she hasn’t succeeded to get them really crispy. So is there any helpful tips?

 

Jack McNulty  30:41

Yes. Good question Marie. So chips, really crispy on the outside, nice and creamy and fluffy on the inside. That’s really what everybody, that’s the Holy Grail, I think of chips or French fries. And there’s a few things when you’re looking at the traditional way of making them there’s a few things that always need to be considered first, the potato variety, which in most cases is going to be mostly starchy or somewhat more on the waxy kind of potato, not the ones that you would use for a salad, not necessarily the ones that you would use as a baked potato. The surface starch needs to be removed, if there’s too much surface starch when you cut into the potato, that starch is going to cook really fast, and it’s going to get dark very quickly and almost create sort of a burned caramelised flavour before the inside is properly cooked, so that’s often washed out by soaking. And then in a traditional way, as the fat that’s cooked, those potatoes are cooked in needs to be primarily saturated. Of course, that’s not necessarily a good idea on what we’re doing and then there’s the double cooking of the potato. So first, the potatoes blanch, usually pre cooked, usually in oil cooled and then cooked the second time, so it’s doubled deep fried, in essence, or double cooked in oil. So to do all of this in a more OMS friendly way, let’s take a look at all of those elements and how I would do it. So I choose a potato variety in this particular case that’s relatively starchy. So I would want to use a potato now that you often use as a baked potato. Go ahead and cut that up, you can leave the skin on or take it off, that’s your choice. The next thing you’re going to want to do is you want to want to parboil the potato. So usually that’s just in a pot of salted water for about 15 minutes and one trick on this is to add about a half a spoonful of lemon juice something acidic into the water. And that acid is going to help the starches on the surface, gelatinise. And that means when the starches start to heat up, they sort of expand a little bit, and there’ll be more of that on the surface than in a non acidic environment and also the acid sort of helps prevent the potatoes from over cooking in case you forget to set your timer. So you remove the potatoes after pre cooking you can do this several hours in advance, let them cool completely if you want or if you’re doing it right away, just go ahead and put them into a bowl, let the excess water sort of evaporate off them and toss them a little bit with a spoon to kind of create a few little rough edges on the surface. That’s going to be real helpful in terms of the browning. Now you can if you want you can add some oil, just enough to coat the potatoes at this point, so I would use an extra virgin olive oil in this particular case, that is optional. The oil is going to maintain some of the moisture in the chip or french fry when you cook it in the oven. If you leave the oil out, the potato will taste a little dryer to some people, that doesn’t matter to others they like it a little bit more moist so that’s why you would just toss just enough to coat the the potatoes at that point. Then you want to make sure your oven is preheated and relatively hot so around 200 degrees centigrade to 225 that would be 400 to 450 Fahrenheit. And you want to get a baking pan but don’t put any paper or coating on the baking pan, just put the potatoes directly on the pan. Ideally, you want to preheat the pan as well and just get the potatoes in there, you’re going to take about 15 to 20 minutes or so depending on how big of a slice you cook, to cook the potatoes. Now a lot of people, what they like to do is about halfway through, they go there turning brown, they want to get the spatula out and move those potatoes around. But the potatoes are still stuck to the pan and when you do that, you’re going to remove some of that crispy exterior that you just created. That would be a bit of a shame I suppose, a potato is going to release itself from the pan once it’s done. So just have some patience there. Now the obvious question that’s going to come up is, Well, isn’t that in essence, creating a harmful surface on the potato when it’s cooked at that high of a temperature and the surface temperature? So last session of Ask Jack, we talked a lot about the cooking temperatures in an oven and surface temperatures and all of this, so I’ve checked on potatoes and I know that the interior never ever reaches more than about 80 degrees centigrade or well within the range of Fahrenheit, where they’re still around 28, 27 degrees or so, 80 degrees centigrade. So I forget what that is on Fahrenheit, you guys can look that one up. At any rate, the surface temperature will rise to at least 120 degrees. So you don’t want to cook it very long, that’s important to get the caramelisation on the starch. And that creates the crispiness, if you take the potatoes out too quickly, the steam from inside the potato will rise to the surface of the potato and the crispness will start to soften and then you’ll have a soft exterior. So it is kind of important to get it to that right point. But don’t take it too far so that it gets really dark and then you’re going to get into that area of it’s probably not the safest thing to eat.

 

Geoff Allix  37:24

Okay, on to another topic, fun recipe ideas. And we’ve got a question from a listener in the UK on sour cream. So how can you make sour cream at home in a whole food plant based way? Do you have any thoughts?

 

Jack McNulty  37:40

Yes, I do this actually myself. Quite often, I do like having a little bit of sour cream on hand. I think it’s really helpful in this case to have a high speed blender. Something like a NutriBullit will work and not that expensive. Something like a Vita Mix much more expensive, but very versatile, works really great. And so you have a couple of options here you can do a tofu base, or you can do a cashew based or nut based and to do something tofu base, by the way, I’ll leave a link on the show notes for some recipes here, so don’t worry so much about the actual amounts. But basically to do something tofu base, you’re gonna want to use a, I call it a sort of a soft tofu but not too soft like a really soft silken tofu. They have silken tofu that’s called firm silken tofu, if that’s not too confusing, that’s about the same consistency. So you don’t want to necessarily use a really hard tofu for this but just get a tofu that’s relatively soft. Mix that with I like to use a little bit of soya yogurt at the same time that adds a little bit acidity to it. I put some lemon juice into my mixture a little bit of white wine vinegar, I season it with salt and I add a little bit of oil just to make the mouth feel and a little bit smoother. I find that if it’s not there, it’s okay to use but it’s a little smoother on the mouth with a little bit of oil. I just simply blend everything togetherm you can add garlic you can add herbs to that a lot of different ways to flavour, it but it’s a very simple thing to make and it will last about two to three days in the refrigerator after that it begins taking on some sort of funky flavors which are not so pleasant to eat or smell for that matter. Using a nut so you’re going to cashews work the best because they blend up the nicest so I find that soaking cashews first for several hours really help is helpful and then just go ahead and blend those with some water. Maybe some kind of nut milk instead of water so like a soya milk or something of that nature and again I just use a little bit of yogurt, lemon juice, and seasoning with salt. Sometimes a drop or two of vinegar is helpful and then you’re left with a very nice sort of creamy dip as well, it won’t be as substantial as the tofu base but actually quite tasty and then of course you can use something like tahini or a nut butter again and that butter comes up in the conversation and mix that with water with lemons or vinegar and add some spices to it and then make the very nice not completely like a soya cream or sour cream but something very enjoyable to use as a replacement for sour cream.

Geoff Allix  40:50

And so now on to something that’s a particular question of people in the UK, Yorkshire pudding, which is a traditional part of the British Sunday roast dinner. So Anne from the OMS circle in Hertfordshire wants to know do you have any recipe suggestions for OMS compliant Yorkshire puddings which replicate as near as possible, the original in which the batter contains eggs and fat. A particular member of her circle in Herfordshire nearly always complains everything she tries leads to Yorkshire puddings as flat as pancakes. So do you have any tips? Are you aware of what Yorkshire pudding is?

 

Jack McNulty  41:35

As a chef I know very much what a Yorkshire Yorkshire pudding is. Yes, I just think it would be probably not in my place as an American to comment too much on a Yorkshire pudding. But let me tell you that I know Yorkshire pudding is one of those chef challenges. It uses common ingredients, not too many ingredients. And it’s technically very challenging, even when done in a traditional way to make a proper Yorkshire pudding, that should be risen adequately should have a crispy exterior, really fluffy and light inside, that sort of thing is what you’re looking for. So it’s sort of like the challenge of making a souffle, I suppose from a chef’s perspective, everybody wants to make one because they’re difficult to make even though they use simple ingredients. The challenge with doing a Yorkshire pudding in an OMS compliant manner is not so much with replacing the ingredients which is primarily going to be replacing eggs and fat. Those things on the surface, those are those are doable, that’s a that’s something that can be done on the OMS diet. The real problem is that a proper Yorkshire pudding is more or less going to be deep fried in sort of like a muffin tin or, or some kind of shape like that, which is where you’re going to run into the issue and that’s where the crispy exterior really comes from. To make something like a Yorkshire pudding, you need to make sure that the oil is very hot in your oven before the batter goes in there and it instantly seizes up and away you go with making a Yorkshire pudding, you know, and getting it into the oven and all of those sorts of things. There are some ways to do it in a vegan manner. I personally don’t make them, probably because I’m American and not from York. But I will go ahead and in the show notes I’ll post a link that talks all about Yorkshire pudding and how to make it an in a vegan manner I found a pretty good site that gives a good explanation on both both cases and maybe with that that will help you on your path but personally I think it’s going to be always a difficult recipe to recreate just because of that issue with the fat that’s going to go into the muffin tin.

 

Geoff Allix  41:36

Yeah, I mean I cooked a mean Yorkshire pudding in my time and the ingredients are very, very simple; One egg, three ounces of flour, five fluid ounces of milk I think and then it was the art, the tray which was like you say cake tray/tin, It had quite a lot of oil in it and it was heated completely so when you put the batter into it, it was almost like deep frying when it went in it sizzled and that was the key to it. It was a lot of oil and it was very hot oil. So yeah, yeah, I’ve never done them since.

 

Jack McNulty  45:01

Yeah, it may be unfortunately one of those cultural dishes, you’re gonna have to take a pass on.

 

Geoff Allix  45:08

So the next question on our fun recipe ideas, Anne had another question that might be relevant to many of our listeners who love to bake. How do you make cakes tastes light and moist when many of the ingredients needed to do so aren’t OMS friendly?

 

Jack McNulty  45:27

Hmm. That’s an outstanding question. I think definitely, we’ll probably talk about this later. But maybe we should make one of our future episodes solely on vegan baking, because there’s a lot to go into on that particular question. Let me give the abridged answer to get us started and maybe point you in the right direction with some of the show notes that we’ll be including. So, in making a cake taste light and moist, there’s a few things you’re going to want to do on in an OMS environment. First of all, and this is the one thing that drives me crazy as an author of recipes, when I know someone’s making a recipe, they’ll read through the recipe and then they’ll just start putting things together and without looking down the road and trying to think about everything like that I turn the oven on. Hey, now you make your whole batter and everything and you realise that the the ovens not on, there’s gonna be very important in making OMS type cakes. Just make sure that some of those things like the oven is really preheated by preheated meaning, do that about a half hour in advance at least and that’s the very first thing I would do. The second thing is, you know, are there things that you can make ahead of time like buttermilk, vegan buttermilk, for instance, is often used in baking. And so that’s a simple mixture of soya milk and a drop of lemon juice or vinegar. But for that to really take effect it needs to sit for about 15 minutes off to the side. So just do that and get it off to the side and let that do its thing without having to do it really at the last moment. So that’s the first thing is just making sure everything is prepared and you have everything on hand. The next thing is to really consider your leavening agents. So a leavening would be how the cake is going to rise. Typically that’s done with baking powder, baking soda, sometimes a combination, or eggs. So baking powder, and baking soda require a few things to think about. If you’re using baking soda, baking soda reacts with acid in a mixture. So that’s why buttermilk is often part of it that’s acidic, and the baking soda needs that acid to actually react, create bubbles and that’s what makes everything sort of rise up a little bit, but that works immediately. So once you make your mixture you got to get it into your pan, you got to get your pan into the oven immediately there’s no time to let it just sit on the counter and wait for your oven to preheat. Baking powder on the other hand, you can let kind of hang out for a little bit but not too long. So that’s something to consider. So replacing eggs is another issue with how to do that and egg in a cake recipe is typically going to do a few things. So it has fat so the fat and the mixture is going to create the texture help create the texture, that flaky cake like texture. It’s also going to provide some degree of leavening through the egg white effect of the egg. And so when you’re thinking about replacing an egg there are several things that you can do, so a lot of people say well you can do it with a flax egg by mixing flax seeds, ground flax seeds with water, that’s going to help with binding but it’s not necessarily going to do anything with rising or leavening. You can do things with mixing vinegar with baking soda which we just talked about that’s really going to help and that will help replace the eggs. Personally I like using a mixture of silken tofu a very small amount of aqua faba, which is the water from cooking chickpeas, and just mixing that together to create a sort of egg like consistency, and that works quite well, in terms of adding leavening, especially if you add just a touch more baking powder to the mixture, so that helps in terms of the leavening. Fats are what’s going to give you the texture of a cake, the real crumbly like feeling. And so mostly, cakes are made with butter and that’s usually easily replaced in a recipe by using oils. So a butter is 80% to 82% fat, so if you just do the arithmetic, you can replace the amount of butter in a recipe by just adding 80% of that as just a fat and then just making up the rest in terms of the just by adding water really. Beating is another issue or over mixing in a cake, this is going to cause it to be very dense. So if you over mix a batter, it’s going to create glutens and those glutens are going to create a sort of dense texture in your cake, which is obviously what you’re not looking to make. So when mixing your batter, it’s important to just have all of the wet ingredients off to one side, mixing it all into one bowl, take all your dry ingredients, mixing them all together in the other bowl, helpful if you sift it all together to make sure there’s an equal distribution of all of those dry ingredients. And then you add simply the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. I usually do that in thirds, and I just take a spatula and just easily just sort of folding it in I mean, it’s just lifting the spatula to the bottom or putting the spatula to the bottom lifting it up and turning it over. And just doing that a few times to mix it together. In a cake, it’s okay if there are still little bits of flour that you see that will sort itself out in the baking. So what you want to avoid is just using a mixer, over mixing that. And then finally, what causes a lot of problems for people is they tend to undercook cakes in an OMS environment. So that means they take them out of the oven just too soon and that will create just quite a dense sort of cake. Just it’s very easy to check, just drop a knife or a toothpick in the middle of a cake, If it comes out clean, it’s fine. If there’s any moisture to it, you’re probably going to want to leave it in the oven for another five minutes or so. There’s there’s actually quite a lot that we can talk about in terms of how to create a really light and moist kind of cake, but that those tips will help you get started.

 

Geoff Allix  53:00

Thank you. And for a last question and end this episode on a crunchy note. Do you have any recipe ideas for gluten free crackers and snacks or anything savory that packs a crunch?

 

Jack McNulty  53:13

Yeah, and again, we’ll include some links in the show notes on this. Rather than just going through an actual recipe here on the podcast. Certainly corn tortillas. People overlook tortillas in terms of their versatility. It’s very simple to make and you just need the right kind of flour to do that and it’s just basically just mixing that with water. But the real important aspect of making a nice crispy cracker is rolling them out nice and thin. And just the tip I would have for that is just get a piece of parchment paper or baking paper, put your dough on it, roll it out with a rolling pin, get it as thin as you possibly can at that point on the paper itself and put another piece of paper on top of that and roll it even thinner. Just get it as thin as you possibly can in between two pieces of paper. Transfer that paper all onto your baking sheet and then just remove the top paper before you actually bake it. It’s always a good idea to sort of score the crackers into rounds or triangles or rectangles, whatever shape you want, before actually putting it into the oven by scoring not just this, putting a knife through the dough, at least halfway through. It’s not necessarily to go all the way through, that way when you take them out of the oven when they’re done, they just easily break at that point where you cut them and then you have nice portions on there, and baking them, you know, 10 to 15 minutes at 200 degrees centigrade, 400 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on your mixture is usually enough to get a nice crispy cracker. The fortunate aspect with doing gluten free is gluten is not necessary in most crackers. So you’re already at an advantage, you just use your imagination, use a lot of different flours, mixing it with the right amount of water to the point where you created dough that you can just roll out and there you go. You can add whatever kind of flavoring you want in there. There’s a lot of different variables out there.

 

Geoff Allix  53:43

Brilliant. So, thank you very much for giving us your expertise, again, on this episode and we look forward to having you back for us Jack Number Three, which will premiere on July the 12th.

 

Jack McNulty  55:59

Thanks, Geoff and thanks to everybody for the great questions. Be sure to get your next questions in for our next episode in the summer. Again, we’re going to just try to create a little bit of a theme, a program with meat alternatives, grilling and picnics. So if you have anything in those categories, feel free to send us an email at [email protected]

 

Geoff Allix  56:29

Thank you very much.

 

Jack McNulty  56:31

Okay, Geoff. Thanks very much.

 

Geoff Allix  56:36

Thanks for listening to this episode of Ask Jack the special five part series where we dive into questions from our OMS community about all things food, please check out this episode show notes at overcomingms.org/podcast you’ll find all sorts of useful links and bonus information there. If you’d like to submit a question for a future episode of Ask Jack, please email us at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. Ask Jack is kindly supported by a grant from the Happy Charitable Trust. If you’d like to support the Overcoming MS charity and help keep our podcast advertising free, you can donate online at overcomingms.org/donate Thank you for your support. Ask Jack is produced by Overcoming MS, the world’s leading Multiple Sclerosis healthy lifestyle charity. We are here to help inform, support and empower everyone affected by MS. To find out more and subscribe to our e-newsletter, please visit our website at overcomingms.org Thanks again for tuning in and see you next time.