Kate Bracks

masterchef’s Kate Bracks

Why is the winner of TV cooking show Masterchef not in charge of her own restaurant?

Kate Bracks is an unusual Masterchef winner, having returned to her quiet town of Orange to raise her three children and write a recipe book.

“I went on Masterchef to learn as much as I could and I want to use those skills in a foodie-style Bed and Breakfast,” Kate says, adding that she and her husband Luke are still investigating the project’s viability.

“With the stage of life I am in, as a mother, it is not an option to become a chef.”

Enjoying being back with her family after over six months apart, Kate is busy writing a cookbook of her favourite desserts to be released next year, which will be titled ‘The Sweet Life’.

“The idea is to take a basic skill, like making meringue, show how to do it and a few recipes that use that technique in a dessert, like a lime meringue pie,” she explains.

Kate hopes to include the infamous coffee cake recipe that sent her into the Masterchef top 24 — which is also the very recipe that began her love of baking at just eight years of age, when her mother suggested some baking would allay holiday boredom.

A giggling Kate recalls: “It was the era of Peter Russell-Clark so I set up my little containers of ingredients and talked to the wall as if it was the TV. It was probably quite a gaudy result, but my family, of course, loved it.”

Kate wanted to become a chef until she found out during Year 10 work experience that it meant “working while others played”, so when school finished, she remembers being settled on becoming a school teacher but was still at a crossroads in regards to her spiritual direction.

“I grew up in a Christian family, so I was very familiar with who God was, but I was in a long-term relationship where my boyfriend was not really following God any more and I was depending on things other than God.”

Kate says she always knew that “God created the world and us so that we would be in relationship with Him, yet He doesn’t force Himself down our throats, He just lovingly shows us Himself.”

Balanced against that, Kate explains, is the fact that, “at the end of time He will judge us.”

But she adds that there is good news: “God’s love for us was shown in the fact that He sent Jesus to take our punishment for those who are in relationship with Him, so if we trust in Jesus’ sacrifice we do not need to fear that judgment day, knowing that we are forgiven.”

After spending a year overseas away from her family, Kate returned and started attending a church that taught the Bible accurately.

“I remember in that new church fully grasping what grace was,” Kate says.

Kate realised that God’s forgiveness was not dependent on her own good deeds, but on God’s undeserved favour in putting Jesus’ perfect sinless record on her own record.

As the Bible says in Ephesians chapter two: “Because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our sins — it is by grace you have been saved... and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Realising she no longer needed to work for God’s approval, but only daily surrender her life to God’s control, she says she fully believed in Jesus and from that point on “I had this thirst to learn more about God and who He says He is in the Bible”.

“I felt a strong sense that I should compete in Masterchef”, says Kate Bracks

Kate says she also knew that God wanted her to end the relationship with her boyfriend who was no longer following God. Some years later Kate married Luke, a man who loves Jesus as much as she does and is also a school teacher.

Through her life’s journey she says at times it has been difficult to know what God wanted her to do, but He has always continued to grow and guide her.

“Every day, God talks to me in the Bible and I talk to Him in prayer,” she explains.

There were indications from God that He was urging her to compete in Masterchef — one being that her husband and children fully supported her and prayed with her about the decision, and her friends were highly supportive as well.

“I went into the competition with a very strong sense that God was leading me there and my job was to be faithful to Him,” Kate says.

“Then when the opportunity with the Dalai Lama came up it gave me a real sense of clarity that this was my time to stand up for God.

“I suppose a lot of people knew I was a Christian but probably didn’t expect that I would go to such lengths as to refuse to call the Dalai Lama ‘Your Holiness’, and so I think that prompted a lot more questions from the crew and the contestants about what I believed: ‘So what is it exactly that you believe? What type of Christian are you? What do you think holiness is?’”

Kate shares she had more than twenty conversations about the good news of Jesus Christ.

“Don’t know if you noticed watching on the TV that I looked exhausted, and I was, because there was a lot more going on for me, more than just the cooking.”

As for the future, Kate feels safe based on past experience that God will always guide and never abandon her.

“I look back and see times when perhaps I stagnated in my relationship with Him,” she says, “but all through the peaks and troughs of walking with God, He has never left me.”