MasterChef winner Nadia Lim says she cannot wait to get stuck into her new life as a celebrity chef after keeping quiet about her win for six months.
Eight hundred and fifty thousand people tuned in to see Lim topple rival Jax Hamilton on TV ONE last night.
Now she is a household name and planning for a busy future.
"I'm going part time at my dietician job at the Diabetes Foundation," the 25-year old told ONE News.
"I'm doing some work with the Heart Foundation, the Nutrition Foundation and I really want to get stuck into doing the cookbook so I'm looking forward to lots of time in the kitchen."
Lim has been busy already with a string of photshoots and interviews. Last year's MasterChef winner, Brett MacGregor said she should get used to it.
"I think she should be prepared not to spend too much time at home," he said.
Poker face
Lim says she developed a "really good poker face" when the show ended so as not to reveal she was the winner.
"I just went back to normal life," Nadia told TV ONE's Breakfast.
She said despite being pushed by people, she would never have revealed she was the one.
"I would get quite a lot of questions in the beginning but once people realised they couldn't get anything out of me, they stopped asking."
That pressure was nothing compared to the palpable tension in the final, when Nadia said that despite having a six point lead over 45-year-old mum Jax Hamilton going into the " macaroon challenge" she still didn't think she had definitely won.
"I thought I could easily lose this... Jax is a really good cook and it was a dessert tower. I'm not good at towers as we saw in one of the other other episodes."
For a few seconds at the finish Nadia still wasn't 100% sure because they both had "really good towers" - but Jax's hopes were dashed in the "dessert disaster" as her tower began to disintegrate.
"It was disappointing to see that... I can't put myself in Jax's shoes," said Nadia.
It was the first occasion in which Jax became tearful, something Nadia was renowned for throughout the competition.
But Nadia told Corin Dann on Breakfast that wasn't the real her.
"The tears were really annoying," the 25-year-old said. "I just couldn't help it. My friends have said they have seen me cry more times on the show than they have since they've known me. And it's like watching a different person."
She said the tears may have come from the intense pressure over the weeks. When the cameras stopped rolling each day, the contestants couldn't just go home and take a break.
"It was three months away from friends and family and not being able to see them," Nadia said. "The big thing was we weren't allowed out of the house, not a foot outside the door. We couldn't even go for a short walk."
Jax agreed. She told Good Morning today that she wasn't "normally a crier".
"It all came to a head at the end. How could there not be tears? It's partly about it being the end of the show as well. The tears just came," she said.
Jax said she had a hard time keeping the secret of her final loss from her friends and felt quite emotional about it.
"My friends were really gutted, they thought I had it in the bag and it was hard to look them in the face and know that I hadn't," she admitted.
Low expectations
The Aucklander admits she didn't even expect to get through the first round of interviews and took the contest "challenge by challenge".
She said she was really happy to get into the top 12 and once she got to the top six she started thinking, "I really could do this and I'm going to go for it".
Lim said she liked all the invention tests but wasn't a fan of the pressure tests where they had to follow a recipe and had a strict timeframe.
"At home I'm more of a cook where you put in a little bit of this, taste a little bit of that...
"I like freestyle cooking. I follow recipes sometimes but I prefer to have lots of ingredients on the table and look at the colours and the types of food there and make something from that."
Nadia, a nutritionist, believes that cooking by colour makes a difference nutritionally. "If there's more colours there's going to be more vitamins and minerals in it too."
The new MasterChef is still revelling in the judges' praise of her pork belly, with Simon Gault saying it was the best thing he had ever eaten in MasterChef history.
"I couldn't believe it," she said.
And Nadia is full of praise for the judges, Gault, Josh Emett and Ray McVinnie, whom she describes as good guys.
"Simon said at one point 'I feel like I am everyone's dad. The three of them are so genuine. They really cared and were very supportive and encouraging."
She says her plans now are firmly focused on the food industry.
"I've kind of known that since I was young that my career could only involve food, my biggest passion."
Nadia will be writing a series of recipes for the Heart Foundation on their website.
"I realise how much of an impact what and how we eat has on our health, including our heart health," Nadia said. "Problems such as diabetes and cardio vascular disease are growing when so much of it could be prevented, which is sad."
She said her work with the Heart Foundation allows her to break stereotypes and show how 'fine food' can also have a healthy twist.
Nadia's first recipe for the Heart Foundation, Miso Glazed Salmon with Rainbow Noodles, is on their site while all the MasterChef show's recipes are here.
Nadia won a cookbook deal, cash and a new car - a black Skoda that she got the keys to on Breakfast this morning.
If you missed the epic two hour Grand Final, watch it here.
Source: TVNZ
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