Original MasterChef Australia winner Julie Goodwin is bringing her famous fish stew recipe to the Auckland Food Show. Photo / Stephen Barker
Haters said the competition was rigged - that Julie Goodwin won the popularity contest, but didn’t deserve the cooking show title.
The aftermath of the first season of MasterChef Australia was brutal. Critics wondered who would bother buying Goodwin’s cookbook: “I already have 500 lamb roast recipes,” sniffed one keyboard warrior.
Our Family Cookbook went straight to number one and stayed there 10 weeks. In 2010, Goodwin would be named Australia’s best-selling author. Between then and now, she would write five more books and a regular magazine column, release an album of Christmas classics, host her own television cooking shows, open a cooking school and launch a breakfast radio programme.
She would also stop doing all of those things. Because, one day in 2020, when he didn’t know what else to do, Goodwin’s husband Mick took her to a hospital emergency department.
“I just couldn’t see a way forward,” she says. “I just couldn’t figure out how to get on with my life. I thought . . . I felt like . . . my work was done.
“I told him where I was. Where I was at. And, yeah, he just said ‘I don’t know how to help you - I’m taking you to hospital’. I begged him not to.”
In a photograph from that first cookbook, Goodwin wears a blue smock top and serves crumbed chops, peas and carrots. On television last month, her eyebrow arch was immaculate. She wore textures of black, made-for-the-camera hair and, on the table behind her, a sea of cloches covered the multitude of ingredients needed to make her famous fish stew.
“I’ve been bigger, I’ve been smaller. I’ve got white hair and I wear clashing clothes and weird shoes. I’m a grandmother. I can wear what the hell I want. I’ve changed all through my life and now, I’m just sort of leaning into being a bit of a mad granny.
“At any given moment, that’s who I was. It’s the truth . . . I’m not going to paint over what used to be and pretend it was something else, because that’s not true.
(Later, she claims she’s too lazy to be disingenuous - keeping track of stories is hard work).
“In terms of being honest about horrible things? There’s no point in being secretive. If you’re secretive, then people will make stuff up about you.”
And so Goodwin will tell you she spent six weeks in a mental health facility being treated for depression. That, over the next two years, there would be five more hospital stays. That in 2018, she was charged with drink driving, and that there was a time when she felt too anxious to set foot in her kitchen.
She will also tell you that last weekend she cooked and froze giant batches of pea and ham soup, bolognese sauce and slow roasted lamb shoulder; that she makes (and sells) miniature pizza earrings from polymer clay, that she loves jazz standards and the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks, and that she tries to swim every day. But, the single, most important thing she would like you to know?
“You are not as pivotal to the world as you think you are.
“As important as you are, and as unique and special as you are, you’re not the only person who can do things and you’re not the only person who makes the world turn.
“I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean that as a gift. Give the people around you a little bit of credit - your family for being able to actually do things that they don’t demonstrate to you they can do. Your workmates for being able to step up and take over some projects.”
Goodwin stopped everything because she had to.
“It was like ‘I actually have to burn my life to the ground because I can’t do this anymore’.
“When you go to hospital you’re no use to anybody whatsoever, except yourself. And you’ve got to be of use to yourself, so you can come out and be a functioning human being.”
The 52-year-old’s cooking school in North Gosford, New South Wales, is now an art studio.
“I still cook here and film little videos, but I paint here as well. It’s healed this space for me, because it was a place of enormous stress, once upon a time.
“I finally have been given permission, and am giving myself permission, to explore the things that always brought me joy, that I didn’t feel fitted into an ordinary adult life. You’ve got a family, a mortgage, bills to pay, obligations to meet. All the while, your cup is getting emptier and emptier. It becomes critical that you fill it up.”
Perversely, one of those “cup-fillers” turned out to be a return to the white knuckled (and black aproned) drama of the MasterChef kitchen. She remembers when she got the invite to compete on 2022′s “fans and favourites” season. She consulted Mick (34-years-together-and-counting) and her three now-adult sons. There was, she reported, a strange, fizzy feeling in her stomach.
“And I said ‘I think it’s excitement’. And I hadn’t felt that for a long time.”
Goodwin finished fifth but admits she’d thought it was all over a couple of weeks prior. She had called Mick and broken the news: “He cried and said ‘I’m really proud of you’. And I went back in, and I wasn’t eliminated! From that moment, anything else was a pure bonus because I’d done what I wanted, which was to figure out if I was still essentially me . . . to see if there was still joy and excitement and adventure in my future. And I found all of that.”
When people ask her what she does now, the double MasterChef alumni pauses:
“Hmm . . . I don’t know. You know, my brother-in-law turned around to me and said ‘why do you say that - aren’t you writing a book?’ And, actually, I’ve got two on the go.”
The memoir is a work in progress; in October she will release a “best of” collection, titled “Classic”.
“And it’s called that because of something Jock said to me in this last season of MasterChef. It was the moment where I felt I had permission to present the food that I love. And it was written and titled before he passed away. It was named for him. And I hadn’t told him that yet . . . "
Goodwin’s voice cracks.
Chef, restaurateur and Australia MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo died suddenly in late April. Police discovered the 46-year-old’s body after they were called to conduct a welfare check at a Melbourne hotel. Season 15 of the television show that made him famous was days away from screening. Goodwin (and her fish stew) had appeared as a guest judge on that season, but she’d also worked with Zonfrillo the year prior on the “fans and favourites” contest.
Winning the inaugural MasterChef Australia gave Goodwin an astonishing public profile. What did it mean to finish fifth, all those years later?
“That bloody imposter syndrome that so many of us burden ourselves with lifted from me,” she says.
“I made it to the top five of another season and I thought, well, number one wasn’t a mistake.
“I’ve spent years thinking I must have fluked it. You listen to all those people that say ‘it was rigged, it was bulls***’. Now I can stand here and say I had what it took then, I have what it takes now, and you can’t take it away from me anymore.”
Zonfrillo was not on the judging panel of Goodwin’s first round, but she has previously said his openness about mental health struggles has part of her own “healing journey”. And, on her last day on set, Goodwin spent an hour in the backstage green room, talking to Zonfrillo for a potential podcast.
“That day, that’s the last time I saw him. Afterwards, we had a great chat . . . He said ‘I don’t even have a podcast, I’m just recording all the people that I’m working with, while I have the chance’ . . . And, yeah, it was devastating watching that episode.”
On screen, Zonfrillo described Goodwin’s food as “humble, heartfelt and delicious”. This month, she’s bringing that philosophy to New Zealand. Goodwin is scheduled to make guest appearances at the Auckland Food Show, demonstrating the fish stew that appeared in the recent MasterChef taste test challenge. Exactly how many ingredients did those contestants have to identify?
“Oh, look, like a million?!”
It was, reassures Goodwin, a made-for-television recipe.
“By their nature, my recipes are not that complex. I use chorizo, for example, but if you put that in a taste test and somebody says an ingredient that’s inside chorizo, then that’s a correct answer. So they said you can’t have chorizo . . . you’ve got to give them a few things to guess, otherwise it’s all over in 10 seconds. Fair enough. But the one I’m doing in New Zealand is something you can do at home. You won’t have to go out and find 47 ingredients!”
Goodwin lives on the central coast of New South Wales. She describes her cooking as “family focused” - that giant batch of bolognese sauce might become layers in a lasagne, or bolstered with beans and spices for a Mexican-inspired dish - and she is conscious of both the cost of food and the “bloody enormous” influence cooks have beyond the kitchen. Bulk cooking saves the electricity costs of firing up the oven every night. Eating seasonally is not just good for the planet, “there are massive bins of it, and it’s cheap as chips”.
“Cooks have a responsibility to be talking about the provenance of food, the miles that it has travelled, its carbon footprint. We have a responsibility to cook with minimal waste. We have a responsibility to cook with ethical products and that can be as simple as using free-range eggs instead of cage eggs. Cooks are in a position of influence - and I don’t just mean media influence, I mean influence over their families and communities - and they have a responsibility to do things in the best environmental way possible.”
Right now, where Goodwin lives, the citrus season is in full swing. (Lemon Diva Cupcakes, anyone?). If Goodwin had her way, come Christmas, there would be no oranges in the supermarket.
“Look at the label and they’ve come from California. In the middle of summer, we’ve got peaches, nectarines, cherries. I think that cooks can truly be at the forefront of an ecological revolution.”
Julie Goodwin will conduct live cooking demonstrations at the Auckland Food Show, July 27-30, Auckland Showgrounds.
Kim Knight is a senior reporter for the New Zealand Herald and restaurant critic for Canvas magazine. In 2019, she completed a Masters in Gastronomy and was recently named one of New Zealand’s Top 50 most influential & inspiring women in food and drink.
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