Celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
Celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
Is there life after MasterChef? Well there certainly has been for best-selling cookbook author Chelsea Winter, discovers Greg Dixon.
Chelsea Winter is a patient woman.
As I faffed about in her small, bright white home kitchen like some cut-price Jamie Oliver - you know, minus the good looks, massive fortune and restaurant empire - Winter was kindness itself to me, her ageing apprentice.
I was supposed to be baking a date loaf from her new cookbook, Homemade Happiness. In reality, she had done all the prep herself and, with the quiet calmness typical of, say, a primary school teacher, was now guiding me as I fluffed my way through the business of creaming the butter (done by a machine, phew), zesting an orange (thank goodness for the "microplane"), breaking eggs and then adding baking powder, baking soda and various spices before we got to the business of combining everything in one bowl.
In a show of bravado I decided to approach this last bit like, you know, a bloke, and get stuck in. It was only then that I detected a slight note of dismay in her voice.
"A light touch is required," Winter said quickly, then, her composure returning, "what we've done is aerate the butter with that sugar and then once all the other ingredients are in, we fold it in delicately. We fold it in with very light, delicate, gentle movements - like you were folding your grandma into bed."
Like folding your grandmother into bed! I wasn't quite sure what to expect of Winter - past winner of some television show called MasterChef, now a best-selling cookbook author - but her capacity for a memorable phrase was certainly a pleasant surprise.
So then. The date loaf mixture folded together (delicately, of course) and then poured into a tin (ditto) and then popped in the oven, Winter declares herself satisfied with my efforts - "well done, you passed the test" - and settles down to the business of instructing her ageing apprentice in the business of Chelsea Winter's Philosophy on Food.
This, too, is refreshing. She is a big fan of butter, which is, in my view, the only sensible view on butter. She agrees with me, too, that the only sensible view on margarine is that it is the devil's work.
"Margarine, get the hell out of my house!" she bellows.
More pleasingly still, she is not one of the pink salt brigade, one of those awful trendy foodies with quinoa and kale and collard greens on the brain.
"I'm very, very conscious of not being preachy," she says firmly. "I'm not here to tell people what to do and what's cool and what is fashionable and how you should do this or that. That's not my bag. I'm not here to boss people around and make them feel guilty about this choice or that choice or act like I know everything about everything, because I certainly don't.
"I just want people to enjoy cooking again. I want them to get their mojo back in the kitchen, I want them to crank out amazing meals and I want dinner time or baking time or whatever to be an enjoyable family experience that everyone loves. For some people, it is not easy."
Canvas writer Greg Dixon bakes a date loaf with celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
Well no, but then we aren't all masterchefs.
Can a reality TV show change your life?
It certainly did for Winter. When the then-28-year-old walked into the MasterChef house back in 2012, almost against her better judgment, she wasn't quite a corporate drone - she was working in marketing at the time - but she was certainly feeling the need for change. She had actually had an earlier chance to change her life; she applied to be a contestant on the show the year before, and got the call-up but had "wimped out". But the following year, her then-boyfriend, now husband, Mike Bullot, convinced her to do it.
"I didn't think I'd be good enough to get on," Winter says. "I was working at a bank doing marketing and climbing the corporate ladder. I had this thing in my mind that I needed ... to work my way up and that was the right thing to do. So while I was tempted with the idea of going on the show and doing something with my passion for cooking, I just thought 'oh it's not really realistic, it's probably not the sensible thing to do'."
As someone who has never watched a full episode of MasterChef, let alone an entire season, I confess I was rather surprised to learn that to win the show Winter had to spend weeks and weeks living in the show's house before snatching the title in the grand final in June of 2012. Three months seems like madness, and it was. Which is why, despite the programme now feeling like an age ago to Winter, her memories are still as crisp as an iceberg lettuce.
"It's a roller coaster, there is no way you can prepare yourself for it. It is harder and more frustrating and more emotional than it looks just watching. It's crazy! And you're in a bubble, you know, outside rules don't apply. Outside things that you used to worry about like bills and work and family and traffic - it's all gone. And you're just living in this crazy vacuum, a vortex of MasterChef and it does strange things to people. But it was pretty incredible."
Canvas writer Greg Dixon bakes a date loaf with celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
As was the prize package. After disposing (figuratively speaking of course) of Waiheke Island's Ana Schwarz down the MasterChef house's insinkerator in the final "Torturous Trifle" challenge, Winter was awarded more than $100,000 in loot, including a car, 20 grand's worth of groceries along with fancy kitchen appliances. However, the prize that most excited her was the cookbook deal with Random House.
"I just decided to get stuck in. I quit my job and thought I'm going to give this cookbook everything I've got. I'm going to make it as amazing as I can and hopefully that leads to other things. And it did actually. The first one, At My Table, when it came out they printed a modest amount - no one really knows how these things are going to go - I think it was 6000 and they couldn't keep it on the shelves. Word kept spreading apparently. I think there was about a month where there were just none and I think that worked well in my favour."
That first book and her second, Everyday Delicious, have gone down a treat, gracing the best-seller lists alongside (and sometimes ahead of) cookbooks by much more established names like Annabel Langbein, Simon Gault, Jo Seagar and Allyson Gofton.
Cookbooks are a very significant part of the publishing business both here and overseas. Indeed, industry figures show for the first half of this year the top five best-selling books were dominated by food, with four out of five spots taken by cookbooks, making books about food the most successful part but also the most cut-throat part of publishing. And this last bit, the hellish competition, is something that Winter is acutely aware of. "It's so hard, there are so many cookbooks out there and [at the outset] I didn't know how mine was going to be any different," she says.
"I just thought all I can do is be myself and put the food in there that I cook, that I enjoy and that I know other people enjoy eating. Stuff all the fads or what is cool or the trends or all of this crap, I'm just going to do what I can ... "
As a recipe for success, you'd have to say it's working: in the top five non-fiction for the first half of this year, Winter's Everyday Delicious was at number four, behind Langbein, but ahead of Gofton and another MasterChef alumni, 2011 winner Nadia Lim.
That might just be why Random House has ordered a huge first print run for Homemade Happiness.
Canvas writer Greg Dixon bakes a date loaf with celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
Winter's mother has a story about her youngest that she likes to tell. When young Chelsea was about 3, her mother came into the kitchen to find her daughter sitting on the bench - the stove was off, you'll be pleased to know - with a pot of cold water containing a few broken-up carrots and a couple of potatoes.
"Oh Chelsea, what are you doing?" her mother spluttered.
"Cooking, Mummy," came the reply.
If this sounds a little apocryphal, well that is the way of such stories, especially when little Chelsea happened to grow up to win MasterChef. And it also happens that Chelsea, the youngest in the Winter family by 10 years, may have been, at least according to her brother and sister, a little bit spoiled.
Born in Hong Kong - her father was working in real estate there - and then raised on lifestyle blocks at Tamahere near Hamilton and then Kumeu, Winter's early memories are of her mother's vege garden, home kill in the freezer and a world of animals and green fields and happiness.
"I just remember a great childhood. A huge part of it was living on the land around animals, mud. In Kumeu we had 25 acres [10ha], too. So my childhood consisted of making mudslides into the creek and catching eels and building tree huts and just generally being a tomboy. It wasn't until I left home at 17 that I became a city sort of girl."
She left Westlake Girls' expecting to follow her brother, who is in marketing, and her sister Dana, who is a graphic designer, to university, enrolling in an BA at Victoria. It was a brief, failed experiment.
"At 17, I just didn't have friggin' clue what I wanted to do. I was like 'okay, well I should probably go to uni because that's what everyone does'. So off I toddled down to Wellington and I just signed up to a BA or something. And after a couple of weeks I was like 'what am I doing? This is so stupid, I'm going to waste three years of my life and all this money and I don't even know what I want out of this', so I left."
After waitressing for a year, she got an entry-level job in marketing.
"I started off in real estate, as a marketing co-ordinator, and then the finance sector. So about the two most uncreative and uninspiring [areas]." She laughs. "And my family was probably thinking 'what on earth is going on?' I'm a bit of a free spirit, so it was only a matter of time before that [her marketing career] sort of came to an end. I wasn't very happy, to be honest, in that sort of world."
By the entrance to the kitchen of the Pt Chevalier home she and Bullot will soon sell for a new home they're building, hangs a framed quote. "These days are golden," it says.
And aren't they? Since winning MasterChef she has married her boyfriend - a businessman and yachtsman (she repeatedly refers to him as "my husband" in the way that recently married people do with that amusing mix of surprised ownership and happy pride in having such a thing) - completed three cookbooks, become Woman's Day's food columnist (she's recently quit this particular gig) and has, this year, done a food tour to Italy.
The 31-year-old has been an ambassador for Beef and Lamb, has done food shows alongside Ray McVinnie, one of the MasterChef judges in her year, and has seen her Facebook page, which she tends like a diligent gardener, grow and grow to nearly 250,000 likes, which is astonishing in New Zealand terms.
New Zealand MasterChef star Chelsea Winter. Photo / Greg Bowker
Golden days? They certainly are. "I say to my husband, 'I'm so happy, should I be waiting for something terrible to befall me?' And he's like 'for God's sake Chelsea, that is not how it works. You've worked hard for this'."
Perhaps a little too hard. Certainly Winter has been busy decluttering her business affairs in recent months, not least because the golden days have seen a few clouds, too.
"I'm a pretty positive person so it takes a lot to stress me out. I'm pretty proud of how I've handled everything so far. It's all been an incredible learning curve. I think you've got to be careful because there are organisations and people out there that will exploit you to make money, they don't actually care about you and what you are doing. It would be nice if the world was a sunshiny place where everyone just had everyone else's best interests at heart but unfortunately that is just not the way it is. So I have become a lot more aware of other people and how you are treated, because there have been a few things which have been a bit ... " She pauses.
"I shouldn't say." She laughs. "I really can't. But it is just the same as anything, you get knocked back, you get setbacks, you get put through the tumble drier, you get shat on and you just have to come out going well 'I won't do that again' or 'I won't work with them again'. But it's all just part of it. I'm quite philosophical about things ... "
One supposes success does that to a person. However, if there is a secret, if you can call it, to her success, it isn't a complicated one. She has got this far by simply pleasing herself, by creating recipes that are the sort of thing she likes to eat.
"One of the key phrases that flashed into my head one day about what I'm doing and what it all means is that basically all I want to do, and what I'm focusing on, is to make people legends in their own kitchens. That is my mantra. When someone makes a recipe and goes, 'This actually looks like it is supposed to,' and then serves it up and their family or friends go, 'Holy shit, this is amazing, what is this, who's recipe is this?' That glow in their heart that they received that amazing feedback about the food they have created is what is all about. That's what all this comes down to is that moment of pride when someone serves up something that everyone loves and raves about. So it is that experience that I'm trying to create in everyone's households with my recipes and books. So as long as I'm doing that, I'm happy. It's simple, that's what I've whittle all this stuff down to."
Celebrity baker Chelsea Winter. Photo / Dean Purcell
Well that, and having good helpers. Her husband has helped her think through her business and her plans. Her mother and stepmother have assisted her as she's put together her new book, and her sister has designed the new one. And then there is me, her ageing apprentice-cum-one-off-recipe-tester.
I passed the test, and so did her recipe: the date loaf, if I say so myself, was spectacular. And if you need any tips on folding your grandmother into bed, I'm your man.
