What went though your mind when you were announced as the winner?
 All these years I’ve been cooking and people have admired my food, I realised they weren’t just being nice
A whole gamut of emotions starting with disbelief - it sounds like a cliché, but it really didn’t sink it to begin with. And then it became a realisation of so many things - all these years I’ve been cooking and people have admired my food, I realised they weren’t just being nice. I felt really honoured and a huge sense of humility. It was a great gift. Then my attention turned to Hannah and Ben, who have become incredibly good friends and I felt bad because I’d take the prize from them. What did you learn about yourself from competing in MasterChef? I’ve learnt that I’ve got such an amazing pool of resources that I hadn’t tapped into. It’s been a lesson to have more self-belief and faith in my ability. I was challenged physically, emotionally and intellectually. We had to argue our philosophy about food, which really tested my strength of character and it was pleasing to know I could withstand this rigorous testing. It was a huge mirror on myself. Describe your dream approach to writing a cookery book.I’m very visual as a person and I’ve trained as an artist and fashion designer. I would come at a cookbook in a very connectional way. My book wouldn’t be a straight-up recipe book; it would pick certain foods and styles and study tastes, textures and the provenance of ingredients. I would look at the history of dishes, where spices came from. I love the mystic. Hopefully it would be artful without being too poncy! What's your advice for prospective MasterChef 2008 contestants? Find your style and be true to it, but also experiment and have fun with it. Go to organic markets and be inspired by different vegetables, fruit, meats and fish. Play with one ingredient and cook it in different ways. As well as what you love, try cooking the things you hate to learn about processes. The key is simplicity though; you always become unstuck if you do too much. Do you think winning MasterChef will open up opportunities to you that you previously could only have dreamed of?I would love to own my own restaurant, which would be a true expression of my type of food and my style. I would like to use travel as a base to learn more about food culture. I want to learn the basics in the coming years - the classical French thing - and then develop that by sourcing wide-ranging ingredients to take classical dishes further. How important is the prize to you?The MasterChef prize is a placement in a top restaurant, though I don’t know where it is yet. On top of that, Pierre Gagnaire has already agreed for me to have three days working in Paris - even if it was just three hours I would get on the next Eurostar! I’ll also be working with Michel Roux at the Gavroche and at the Taste of London event in June. Which chef or cookery writer has most influenced the way you cook?I’m a real fan of Skye Gyngell’s effortlessness and elegance, and I also admire Simon Rogan and Michael Caines for their artistry. I’d like to be somewhere between the rustic elegance of Skye Gyngell and the finesse of Pierre Gagnaire. I love Angela Hartnett and Marcus Wareing’s take on food too. Marcus has built upon classic simplicity and taken it somewhere different. Tapping into your skills as a trend analyst, what do you think is the next big thing in cooking?There’s this current trend of molecular gastronomy, with chefs changing structures and textures and making dusts, jellies and reductions. It’s really interesting, but the next stage is utter simplicity. There’s something about stripping away the superfluousness and making something mind-blowingly simple. Transparency and honesty is driving a move away from ready-cooked pre-packaged food. We’ve got to remember that cooking is fun and family. There’s been so much fragmentation of family units, I really think food can play an important part and bring families or new families together. Very often your timings let you down, what have you learnt about how to ensure all elements of a dish come together at the same time? It was a combination of nerves and preciousness - I was often too preoccupied with the look. That’s all well and good, but in a professional kitchen that counts for nothing. It gets to a point when you have to speed up. You need to work out what you can sensibly do in the time. Over ambitiousness gets you nowhere. You need to cook something simple beautifully and the drama then comes from the flavour, rather than the processes.
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