HUSH HUSH: Christine Ha hasn’t told anyone whether she won the “MasterChef” finale which filmed in April. (
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Christine Ha, the amazing blind cook on Fox’s “MasterChef,” has known since the end of April if she is tonight’s winner. The Houston resident has beat out 16 contestants and says she is “good at keeping my mouth shut. My dad doesn’t even know.”
The other person who definitely knows is Ha’s fellow finalist, Joshua Marks from Mississippi.
Ha, who is also finishing up her thesis in creative nonfiction at the University of Texas at Houston, has a winner’s smile, though, and is in such good humor in a conference room on the 20th floor of News Corp.’s building that it’s hard to believe she won’t go home with a MasterChef trophy, a check for $250,000 and a cookbook deal with Rodale.
She has proven a hit with viewers, having now amassed 12,000 followers on Facebook and another 18,000 on Twitter, figures she can rattle off because her iPhone reads them to her.
For the finale, Ha and Marks will prepare a three-course meal for the judges: reality-show sadist Gordon Ramsay, restaurateur Joe Bastianich and chef Graham Elliott.
In the course of the two-month shoot, Ha became a pro in the studio kitchen, despite several drawbacks: the size of work space, the knobs on the stove, which turned in the opposite direction from the way they do in her home, and the lights, whose brightness gave her headaches.
Spending so much time away from her husband, John, was manageable. Ha and her fellow contestants filmed six days a week and on their day off did laundry and rested.
“We weren’t allowed to speak to friends or family back home or go on the Internet,” she says, ever cheerful. “I was too busy to feel really lonely.” Bonding with her fellow cooks was a way to make the best of an unusual situation, and Ha still keeps in touch with several of them.
Looking back over her weeks on “MasterChef,” Ha says her greatest challenge was making an apple pie.
“I’m not a baker,” she says. “I remember laughing at myself and thinking that my crust must look terrible. I asked Cindy, my kitchen helper, if I had put enough cuts to let the steam out. And she said, the crust was full of them. It was a bad patchwork.”
After landing in the bottom two once on “MasterChef,” Ha had an epiphany.
“I started thinking that I don’t have to guess what the judges want to eat, but make what I want to eat,” she says. “They’ve eaten the best foods in the world. So I started playing to my strengths. I’m a home cook. When I stuck to Southeast Asian cuisine, I won the mystery box challenge.”
Even if Ha doesn’t win “MasterChef” tonight, she scored a rare triumph. She says that Ramsay has a “soft spot” for her.
“He apologizes when he curses,” she says.