Keto for everyday kitchens
Chef Nerys Whelan has come up with a first: a keto cookbook made for Kiwis. No fancy equipment or hard-to-find ingredients needed, finds Kylie Klein-Nixon.
Award-winning Auckland chef Nerys Whelan started working in professional kitchens when she was about 15. From pubs in Taranaki, she went to work at Carrick Winery in Otago, finally finding her culinary home in Auckland’s cutting-edge restaurants.
She discovered keto when it was requested as a dietary option by a client. Under a ketogenic diet, the body burns fat rather than carbs – keto, as it’s known for short, is used to treat epilepsy and type-2 diabetes as well as for weight loss.
Now two years into her own keto journey, Whelan has produced what she believes is New Zealand’s first low-carb, sugar-free cookbook.
NERYS WHELAN
The idea of writing a book started out as joke.
When I first started with keto, I was trying out recipes that I’d seen online, but I thought: ‘‘Oh, I reckon I can make these better,’’ so I started making my own recipes.
Then I thought: ‘‘Wow, I really wish I could help other people and share keto with them.’’ So I started the website [TheKetoChefsKitchen.com] where I’d share free recipes as I started creating them.
I got really good feedback from people about the recipes. That’s when we started joking about the book. You know, you say things in jest, then you think about it a bit, and realise it’s what you actually want and what will really work. That’s where the book began.
I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. There is a lot of trial and error that goes into creating recipes, it can be quite frustrating, but I really love it.
Preparing for the book, I was working 14 hours a day during our level 4 lockdown. It
Whelan’s recipes are designed to work for people cooking in home kitchens, using everyday ingredients. This cake is chocolate... and sugar-free.
was a lot. But I got into quite a rhythm with it, which was cool. The whole book was created in my house.
I wrote the index first because I got overwhelmed by how we were actually going to do it. So I wrote a list of things that I wanted to make keto, then I could make sure there was an even spread of food types throughout the book.
Some of the recipes are non-keto recipes that I have adapted from a typical recipe that would have sugar and gluten.
I would look at the standard recipe more for a guide on ratios, and replace them with keto alternatives. That sounds simple on paper, but then there’s a lot of tweaking and
refining. I’d say, on average, it would be at least three tries refining a recipe – and then some of them would take about 10.
I really wanted to write something that worked for all sorts of Kiwis doing a lowcarb, sugar-free diet.
It’s not just about keto, it fits a huge range of other dietary requirements: people that are diabetic, or gluten-free, or just sugar-free or low carb. It’s actually quite a huge demographic. What I was really trying to do was create a book that would give all of those people a healthier option, especially with things that are sugar-free.
I focused on the everyday cook, who’d be using items you don’t have to search to the ends of the Earth for.
I’m pretty sure it’s the first New Zealand keto cookbook, so that was really cool. There are lots of Australian ones.
My kitchen is – as you can imagine – really important to me. I do really like open
plan kitchens, especially because I spend so much time in there. If there are people around or my partner’s home, it’s just nice to be able to still feel like you’re in the same room.
I try to keep it as uncluttered as possible. Obviously cleaning as I go has been drilled into me in the kitchens I’ve worked in. I just really can’t work in a messy kitchen. Organising and trying to have everything in my cupboards in either jars or stackable containers is important. I know for most people that probably isn’t a huge deal, but for the way I work I need that organisation and to have the bench space freed wherever possible.
I do love cooking gadgets.
But for the recipes I do, I try to steer away from things that a normal household wouldn’t have, just because it’s a bit more practical. So although I love my stand mixer, people can still do that stuff by hand in my recipes. If you start using things like sous vide etc, that’s not really everyday equipment.
I really wish I had a walk-in butler’s pantry, where I can leave like the equipment out but still have it tidy. That’s a future plan, for sure.
Beyond that, I always prefer cooking on gas – that’s just the chef in me – but at the moment we have a ceramic stove top, and it’s pretty good.