2012-10-09-Master Cheff Christie Ha
Seminars@Hadley
MasterChef Winner Christine Ha:
My Delicious Experience
Presented by
Christine Ha
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
October 9, 2012
Dawn Turco
Good morning, and welcome to today’s Seminars@Hadley. The topic is MasterChef Winner Christine Ha: My Delicious Experience. It was back in May that I sat down to watch one of the TV shows I’ve grown to enjoy over the past few seasons as a home cook. It was called and is called I should say, MasterChef.
It’s on the FOX television network, and it’s a reality TV show where the top one hundred home cooks come on as contestants from around the United States, and they face off to become the next MasterChef. The winner of the show takes home more than just bragging rights. There’s a wonderful cash prize of $250,000, a trophy, and the opportunity to write your own cookbook. How cool is that?
Typically, the viewer sees a hopeful contestant walk in rolling a cart, and the cart contains the dish they plan to present to the judges. Well on this night, when I was watching, what the camera showed was a pair of feet walking in and the tip of a long white cane. Goodness I said, as I’m sure many across the country watching the show, what is this? We have with us today Christine Ha, the 2012 winner of MasterChef.
Much to my delight, Christine has been a Hadley student so I was able to contact her very early on in the show season to send her Hadley’s best wishes and also to invite her to participate in a seminar at Hadley with us. Of course at the time, I had absolutely no idea that she had won. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce to you Christine Ha. First let me say congratulations, Christine, and welcome.
I’m going to hand the microphone over with the hopes that you’ll first tell us a little bit about yourself by way of introduction and a little bit about your onset of your visual impairment and even when did you get interested in cooking? I think that will get us started very nicely. Everyone, I bring to you Christine Ha.
Christine Ha
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Dawn, for that nice introduction. Just wanted to say thank you to everyone for logging in and registering and listening to this. I just wanted to say that I have been a Hadley student for a while and I have found the other side of the microphone and just listened to the Hadley seminars so this is a pleasure to actually be a guest on here this way.
I just wanted to start with saying that I have an autoimmune condition called neuromyelitis optica or NMO for short. It’s similar to MS as the central nervous system is sort of attacked and affected by the immune system. Over time my vision gradually decreased in my 20s.
Starting from when I was about 20 years old, I began losing vision in one of my eyes, and in 2004, it decreased in both eyes to where I could no longer drive. Then in 2007, it decreased to where it is now. Now I see mostly shadows and washed out colors, and I need assistance walking either with a guide or with a cane. This actually coincides with around the same time that I really started picking up cooking.
I started cooking around 19 when I was in college and moved from a dorm to an apartment with a small kitchen and realized that I couldn’t keep eating fast food forever. So I bought a second hand cookbook and just started cooking and experimenting. I realized that it’s difficult to cook for one person so I always invited friends over or had my roommates eat.
After a while, after making a lot of bad dishes, I finally started making some that were edible and then some that were even good. I realized that it was a very enjoyable thing to feed my friends and to have them enjoy my food. I think that’s when my love for food started really picking up and I started cooking more and more.
At the same time, through my 20s is when I was losing my vision so it was sort of a devastating time for me because I thought it was something I wouldn’t be able to do anymore, but lo and behold, there’s adaptive equipment out there that I learned about and if you really love something you don’t let anything stop you. So I got back into the kitchen with some help.
Dawn Turco
Christine, so many of us have some ideas and dreams of what we’d like to do, but we don’t take that step necessarily. What made you decide to audition for MasterChef?
Christine Ha
That’s an interesting question. I get that a lot. My initial reaction is always to say I’m sort of a masochist, but I guess all kidding aside, I am really that type of person. I have that sort of drive in me. It’s just part of my personality to not give up on anything, and I always persevere. I’ve been through a lot in my life that has taught me to always deal with it and try to move on in a positive way.
So this is just another one of those things that I saw as a challenge that I wanted to just take on and really push myself and see how far I could get. I just think it’s just a part of my personality to always try for something if I really want it, and the worst that could happen is I fail at it. Failure’s never fun, but oftentimes you learn from your mistakes and you try again.
If you keep failing, then you just come to terms with the idea that maybe this is not the right opportunity for you, but it never hurts to try.
Dawn Turco
You’re so right about that. Let me talk about the show a little bit. Many of the people listening today are viewers, so they know that each week contestants are given challenges. I have to say, they go out of their way to challenge you. You’re faced with ingredients along with these challenges, and at the end of the night, there’s an elimination, so everybody knows there’s a person going to voted away.
As you went along, was there a particular ingredient that challenged you the most that you’d like to talk about?
Christine Ha
It’s seems to always come down to seafood for me. I would say the sea urchin was definitely a challenging one because we had live sea urchin. For those of you who don’t know what sea urchin looks like before it’s on your plate, it comes in this large brown spiky shell that moves and just has spikes all over it.
Sometimes, they’re poisonous, and that was something I’d never worked with before because it’s a very expensive ingredient. Most of us don’t get that live from the ocean, or we’re not fortunate enough to. Most of the people that work with that are probably chefs in professional kitchens or sushi chefs so that was a challenge to try and figure out what to do with that.
Another ingredient that I had trouble with that probably a lot of people find very easy was salmon. The reason I had problems with salmon is because I second guess myself in that kitchen, and normally, I don’t like to eat salmon cooked. I only like it raw and sometimes smoked.
So I had fileted the salmon deli and set it aside because I was contemplating on serving it either like a Hawaiian poke style, a sashimi, or as salmon tartare, but I thought that the judges would get me on not showing enough cooking technique by serving it raw because they had said that to someone else before the top one hundred.
So I second guessed myself and ended up cooking a salmon which is a way that I don’t normally like to eat it, and I served it to them. After that, I was at the bottom two. I realized that from that point on I could not try to impress the judges because these judges have eaten the best foods in the world, so there’s no point in me trying to cook over the top and impress people that have eaten all over the world.
Instead, I should just stay true to myself, cook what I would love to eat, what I would be proud to serve my family and friends, and at the end of the day, that’s when I started doing better in the competition. So those are the two ingredients I found the most difficult to work with.
Dawn Turco
Indeed. I find myself sitting there wondering how do they have all these recipes in their heads? I’ve always wondered are contestants in between shows sitting there reading through cookbooks and memorizing things? I remember the apple pie night, and I think you made the comment that you had not ever made an apple pie, and it was stunning when you were done.
So how do you all get these challenges, put together a recipe so quickly with ingredients you’ve never used in many cases? Are you all sitting around studying recipes? Tell us the truth.
Christine Ha
The truth is I actually did make an apple pie. I said I had made it once before, but it was several years before I went on the show, maybe two or three years. At that time, I didn’t even use a crust that I had made from scratch, and for the show, we are allowed to bring a certain amount of cookbooks with us. I think the amount is like five, so they cut you off at five. You can bring five cookbooks from home.
When you do have downtime, which is very rare, usually it’s long hours of filming so we’re on set anywhere between eight and sixteen hours a day. Soby the time you get back to your room, you either catch up on sleep because you need to get up early the next day because call time is early, or you have those cookbooks that you can study, but you’re not allowed to bring those cookbooks into the kitchen.
You can only study that on your downtime. So there are certain resources that you can use for yourself, but it’s not like we go into that kitchen with recipes all written out for us. I would say with things like apple pie, the crust, or whatnot, you have to have a broadened knowledge of things, and then you know what works. I think that’s what helped me was that I’ve eaten a lot of different foods.
I have like the basic knowledge about certain techniques and certain ingredients, and then you try to apply that across the field with all of the challenges. I think that’s probably what helped me.
Dawn Turco
You mentioned the judges a moment ago. You had three preeminent food industry judges on this show, all three tough judges. How did you stay so calm under such pressure?
Christine Ha
It’s funny you ask that because everyone tells me when they watch me on TV that I look very calm and collected, but in all honesty, my head was going crazy during every challenge. I’m incredibly nervous. I’m incredibly stressed out.
I don’t know how I come off looking calm and collect, but I can promise you that in my head I have a million thoughts going a mile a minute, and I’m sure as most vision impaired people know when you’re under that sort of situation, you have to memorize everything because you can’t see things. So in my head I have one side of my head is listing everything that I need to do. The other side is keeping track of what I’ve done.
Another part of my head is keeping track of where I’ve laid everything out on my station. At the same time, the judges come and talk to you and ask about your dish, and they’re talking while you’re cooking, and I’m trying to concentrate. So honestly I really don’t know how I came off looking calm because I really did not feel it at all during the challenges.
Dawn Turco
Well, I’ll tell you. Your confidence seemed to build as the season went on. Was there a turning point for you? Going back to the apple pie night, I remember Gordon Ramsey actually taking you to task a bit about your confidence. What was the turning point for you?
Christine Ha
I would say that that apple pie moment probably was definitely one of the biggest turning points. It was when I realized that hey maybe I could do this, and I still had a lot of self-doubt after that because I was picked last for team challenges and other challenges I didn’t do well on. Every day I’d go in there hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
So, I always go in there thinking I might get eliminated regardless of the challenge, but I think the apple pie helped. That moment when Chef Ramsey said I needed to believe in myself and that all the other contestants said my pie looked really good. The only person’s pie that looked better than mine was Felix’s, and I still couldn’t believe that. I just carried a lot of self-doubt. I couldn’t see so there was no proof.
I just had a low self-esteem going in there because I knew I was at an obvious disadvantage compared to everyone else, but that was what ignited a small fire in me that maybe I could compete against all of these people. I think just gradually over time, I just started building more and more confidence.
Dawn Turco
It was at that apple pie moment. I remember Gordon Ramsey took a knife and just gently scraped it across the top of the pie to let you hear that it sounded cooked, and he said the edges were perfectly browned. He did a nice verbal back at you. Certainly you were a first for the show.
Did they get some technical advice behind the scenes when you were moving through the season so well? It seemed like he knew exactly what to do at that moment.
Christine Ha
I’m not really sure. I don’t really know exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Your guess is as good as mine. I’m not really sure how all of that stuff works. We’re just there as cooks, and that’s all we do. So I really have no idea, but I think it was helpful that he scraped the pie for me to hear.
It was sort of proof that my pie did sound good. The crust was solid, so that I was happy about. But as far as technical things, I’m not really sure.
Dawn Turco
Wonderful. We’ve got some more questions. We’re going to get to your plans and some things that have happened since the show. I’ve got a few more questions, but I thought we’d take a short break, open the microphone, and see if some questions have come to mind for the group. So folks I’m opening the microphone.
Patty Jacobson
Hi, Christine, this is Patty Jacobson, and I was wondering when I go into a strange kitchen, I’m almost non-functional. I don’t know where things are. I don’t have things labeled with raised markers or braille. How did you function in a strange kitchen? Were you allowed to make some non-visual adaptations before you started?
Christine Ha
For the MasterChef kitchen station, the ones that we cooked in not when we were out on a field challenge, I did request that they put raised dots on my stovetop handles. They lined the counter edges with textured tape so I would know where the counter ended and I wouldn’t push my olive oil off and break it. Those sorts of things they did adjust for me.
They did purchase a talking food scale, talking thermometer, certain things that I said I had at home when I cooked because they did want to promote my independent cooking on the show. They provided me an aide that helped be my eyes and my legs. Not to give me a leg up but just to level the playing ground. They understood that there were certain things that certain adaptations that they needed to make in order for me to compete fairly.
That was helpful. They completely understood that, but there was a legal team from FOX that was there every day on set listening and watching from the control room to make sure that myself and my assistant followed the rules so there were particular rules that they put in place so that wouldn’t give me an advantage over the other contestants.
Those things they did do for me, but when it came to things like the field challenges where we had to leave the kitchen, that was a whole ordeal in itself, and it was very stressful for me because I had to acclimate myself to an entirely new environment very quickly. The culinary team would give me some time to figure out where everything is.
They took me around and showed me where the flat top grill was, where certain induction burners were, where the pantry was. They took some time out to show me that. The rest of the contestants were also allowed to explore just because if I had time to explore it they also were given time to explore just to be fair, but of course since they had vision, it was a lot easier for them to locate things much more quickly.
Dawn Turco
Okay, go ahead.
Juliana
Hi, Christine, this is Juliana. I wanted to know have you made any desserts yet?
Dawn Turco
Since being off the show, I’ve been making a lot of cookies and ice cream. Cakes and pies are not my forte, so I haven’t been doing that.