Born and bred in Northern Ireland, Jonny Murphy was a professional rugby player for Ulster and Connaught rugby union teams. Having grown up in the kitchen with his Nanny Mamie, baking was a hobby learnt from childhood, and he often brought in home-baked goods to share with his teammates during training. After sustaining a serious injury, he was forced to retire early, and his sporting career was cut short. What started out as a pastime, baking with his grandmother became a solace for Jonny. From selling bakes to his local community during the pandemic to building a huge platform online, Jonny’s world went from scrums to scrumptious baking – and all thanks to the skills passed down to him from his grandmother.
Jonny’s story of and learning essential skills from the ones you love most in your life and passing on family recipes and stores to the next generation, resonated with the Pasta Grannies team, so we were delighted to invite him into our kitchen and to discover that Ireland and Italian potato based doughs, really aren’t too dissimilar after all!
Highlights of our conversation can be found below.
Vicky: Hi Jonny, welcome to Pasta Grannies headquarters! Tell us a little bit about how you went from rugby player to baker?
Jonny: I used to play professional rugby and then unfortunately had to retire due the concussion. I always had a passion for baking; I started a wholesale Bakery in Galway during the pandemic. I moved home after I retired, with the same sort of idea to do something and document my family recipes with my own e-book and then the social media just snowballed and now? Well, a lot’s happened between that but now I’m standing here. It’s been a crazy year.
Vicky: And the baking inspiration came from your granny? Is that right?
Jonny. Yes, my nanny Mamie. She probably taught me everything to be honest. She’s very special and I am very lucky to have her. That’s where my passion for baking started from she would look after me and my little sister in the summer holidays. and If I wasn’t in the garage getting in the way with my granddad, I was making jams and breads and treats. So, she’s been a a big influence on my life.
Vicky: Is there one particular recipe she taught you that you love above all the others?
Jonny: Traditional breads, soda farls, and potato farls especially. A soda farl is similar to a soda bread, but it’s funny in Ireland there’s quite a variance in what you might know as ‘soda bread’. Bread recipes in Ireland are all a little different, and have different names. So a ‘soda bread’ in Galway would be called something like ‘wheaten’ bread in the parts of Northern Ireland where I come from.
Vicky: Oh, that very specific regional terminology sounds a bit like Italy to me! So tell me, when would you eat a soda bread or a potato farl?
Jonny: When you have your ‘fry’. Well that’s another thing actually, you have a full English, or a full Scottish but where I’m from, we’d have an Ulster fry. And that’s when I’d usually have the potato farl or soda farl with your sausages and bacon and eggs. And we like to have beef sausage instead of pork sausage on ours.
Vicky: A bit like some of sausages and meats in Italy too then. I’m sensing some more common themes! In fact, I think I should set you a challenge to make some gnocchi for the first time. I’ve looked at the potato farls recipe in your book Bakes and Wee Treats, and the recipe is very similar to a gnocchi recipe, actually! Gnocchi was a traditional Thursday dish, to use up the left over potatoes. While you’re mashing those spuds, why don’t you tell us a bit about the potato farls and the story behind them.
Jonny: It would have been traditional that any leftover potatoes from dinner the night before would be used to make the bread for the next day. Nowadays, you don’t tend to have left over potatoes in the same way. But it’s just your leftover potatoes and you want those slightly warm put your butter and salt in then your flour in and you just lightly knead it, or mix it, knead it together into just a circle shape. And you flour the top and and then put it generally on a cast iron griddle (or just a big pan will do). In fact, I made some earlier in my mate’s kitchen with very little equipment so you don’t need it. Oh, and you cut it into four which is where the word for farl comes from — it literally translates to four or quarter.
Vicky: And what are the ratios like? In gnocchi, for every 1kg of potato you use about 300 grams of flour.
Jonny: I think the farls recipe is quite similar actually!
Vicky: The main difference is that in Italy it’s plain flour or 00 flour. So obviously your nan taught you to bake but what else was it about this that made it your preferred hobby outside of rugby. It’s quite different from getting covered in mud in a scrum!
Jonny: Well my nan was where it all started and then I started doing things for friends like birthday cakes. And then one day, we had a coffee morning for a hospice with the team I played for and I made a few things. And the lads were like: “you did not make those!” Then it became a sort of tradition that on tough training days where run I would make stuff for the coffee room and the guys would flick me a couple of quid. And we joked, about how when I finished up I should give it a go. And then obviously retirement came little bit sooner than I hoped. It was a bit of a shock and to deal with it, I just sort of threw myself into the baking.
Vicky: And was it very sudden or do you remember the concussion?
Jonny: No, it’s a funny one. Obviously in rugby there’s a lot of big collisions. I had a good few knocks through my career. But I started having migraines. And my symptoms were getting worse, and the knock and my symptoms started to overlap.
I saw a specialist over in Birmingham and gave me the advice after doing the tests that I should retire. I didn’t want to but I had to do what I was told. It was qunfortunately a tough transition. A lot of the lads said they felt guilty. You know, you’re so lucky to do that for ten, fifteen years and it’s your whole identity. But if I didn’t do that, then I wouldn’t be doing everything else and here now, so I do think everything happens for a reason maybe.
Vicky: What is it about cooking that you like so much? And how did baking help you through that period?
Jonny: It was like a type of mindfulness in a way. The best way to put it is like a crutch. I had to retired quite suddenly and the baking, initially was a distraction. At the same time unfortunately, my uncle passed away (my granny’s brother) so there’s quite a lot going on in the space of a couple of weeks which was difficult. I didn’t go to therapy or anything, just doing recipes together was my sort of way of focussing on the important things in life. I saw the impact it had on my grandparents, asking them to show me a recipe for thos or that. And then as the months went on, I think it helped us both in a time full of unknowns. With cooking I find I love doing it for other people. It’s like a show of love.
Vicky: Exactly, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to capture at Pasta Grannies. And so tell us about the timing: was it lockdown that the baking took off?
Jonny: No, not really. I was doing some wholesale bakong during lockdown but it was more when I was retired, I started documenting a lot of my life on social media. You know, recipes with my nan and baking videos and pictures of things I’d made. They started to get a little bit of tractions and then it was 50 thousand, 100 thousand, up to 200 thousand and it just all felt a bit mad—and very quick! I think social media can be demonised in so many ways, but I’ve been very lucky that anyone who follows me has been nice and thinks I’m lovely. I think in some situations social media can do a lot of good as well too.
Vicky: And well, that’s exactly how we’d like to think of it too! We’ve found it a lovely and supportive place too and we want our Pasta Grannies community to feel the warmth and love from our nonnas as if sitting around the kitchen table dining with us all.Thank you Jonny for sharing your story with us.
Bakes and Wee Treats is out now from all your favourite book retailers.
