This season is called Legends because each week a legendary chef will join Ramsay, Sánchez and Bastianich to cull through the cheftestants by sampling their dishes. This week, it will be Michelin Star chef Curtis Stone, who will need to be impressed. Also returning to the show to help the home cooks is season 10 winner Dorian Hunter, who is there to lend her support as someone who knows exactly what they are going through. “I’m just here for encouragement for the next person, for these people who want the dream,” Hunter tells Parade.com in this exclusive interview. “They’re auditioning, and they’re putting their best foot forward, and I’m nervous for them. I can feel being in their shoes in my gut. In the moment, you really don’t see it, but whether you get an apron or not, you’ve beat out so many people, and you’ve accomplished something that most people will never do.” Not that she would know exactly what it feels like to not win an apron, but as a mother, Hunter shares the advice she gives her kids with the contestants that walk away empty handed and that is that they can’t look at not getting an apron as a failure, because just to get to audition is something to be proud of. “In the moment, you don’t really feel that way because there’s this big buildup, and then you have this letdown, but I look at it as a hurdle,” she says. “It’s just a hurdle, and you have so many years of running to do, so you really can’t concentrate on this one hurdle. So, if you don’t get an apron, you go home, you regroup, and you keep running.” It is almost two years since Hunter won—it was September 2019—but then before she had the chance to begin her mentorships at restaurants owned by Ramsay, Sánchez and Bastianich, which was part of her prize, everything got shut down, so she worked on her cookbook and ordered her Viking Kitchen, which was another part of her prize, along with the $250,000. “Winning did free me up from my other form of employment, thank God,” she says. “It gave me the opportunity to really dive into what I wanted to do. Cooking is definitely now in the forefront. I get to do my passion every day. I also do a lot of charitable work. My main goal is to give back as much as I possibly can. Having this platform, I have the ability to bring awareness to some things that maybe people wouldn’t have pai d attention to coming from me before.” Hunter also talked with us more about her cookbook, some of the high points of life after winning, what it’s actually like in the MasterChef kitchen, and the one thing she will never eat! Upon winning, the one thing that you said you really wanted to achieve was your cookbook, so, how is that coming along? It’s very hard. It’s harder than what I thought. It’s going to take me some time because I’m doing it solo, but I’m excited about it. It’s going to be different than most traditional cookbooks. I’ll try not to give too much away, but I want people who don’t cook to want the cookbook and want to read it because it’s definitely going to tell more of my story and my relationship with my mom. So, instead of elevated Southern cooking…? It’s elevated Southern cooking, yes. It’s also going to include some traditional recipes that my mom did, and then, I’ll go back and remake those recipes and elevate them. So, you’ll get a little bit of her and a little of me in the cookbook. How excited are you to get your own Viking kitchen, which is the other part of the prize? I’m excited about it because it’s top of the line. There’s other brands, but this is definitely one of my favorites. I never in a million years thought that I would have my own full Viking kitchen, you know what I’m saying? That’s amazing in itself. I’m still in awe over winning. People ask me all the time, “When do you think it’s going to hit you that you won?” And I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that place. Maybe when your cookbook comes out. Maybe, and that’s what I keep telling myself. Maybe when the cookbook comes out, you’ll see yourself and you’ll realize that that couldn’t have happened had this [win] not happened. It makes me want to work even harder to get the cookbook out. And then being back here and seeing these new contestants going through it, you know that what you have is special, and you want somebody else to be able to experience it. So, that’s just where I am right now. I’m still in the clouds. Even after a year, I’m still in the clouds. COVID shut everything down, but you also have the opportunity to do a mentorship at each of the chefs’ restaurants. I believe the first place I’ll be going is to Chef Aarón’s, which is absolutely phenomenal because I love New Orleans. Me and my husband honeymooned in New Orleans, so it has a special place in my heart. Do they have a place for you to stay or do you have to find it yourself? How does that work? I’m sure they take care of all that. I’m excited about it. It’s almost like a vacation waiting, and even though things don’t move as fast as you think that they’re going to move, you know that you still have gifts coming from all of these little directions from this great thing that just happened to you. So, I’m patiently waiting for everything to kind of fall in place and just looking forward to it. Is there one thing that stands out of everything that you’ve gotten to do since you won? Just the amount of people that I’ve met. What I will never get used to is meeting somebody and they cry. And I’m like, “Why are you crying?” It just keeps me humble because the responsibility is so great. You’re the example of dreams coming true. Like, if it could happen for you, it could happen for anyone. I never thought of it that way. It just catches me off guard sometime because, to me, I’m still just me, you know. And to my family, they’re…and you know, they’ve become more protective of me. They still just look at me as just me, so when somebody comes up to me and they’re emotional, my first question is, why are you crying, you know? Why are you crying? But I guess when you put it that way, I can understand it better. Did you watch the show before you decided to audition? I did. Was it inspirational to you? It was. My mom and I both watched it, and I would tell her that I wanted to do it. She would always tell me, “Well, why don’t you?” I just never really had that confidence to apply. My sister-in-law would tell me every year, “Dorian, they’re auditioning again,” and I just never had the guts to do it. And then, when my mom passed away, it was just like, “Okay, make it or break it. You’ve been trying to get your feet out there for so long with culinary arts and trying to get yourself into the industry for so long, if you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.” So, I just really stepped out on faith and just allowed myself the permission, in my head, to fail, and you have to be okay with it. But who knew? I didn’t know that I would be the winner at the end. Have you kept in touch with anybody from your season? Yes. I went to the Bahamas with Jamie—I call him Captain Jamie—to help with the relief efforts with Abaco Island, which was absolutely phenomenal. I’ve kept in contact with a lot of people from the top 8. Going to the Bahamas was tough, it was humbling, and it put you in a place of wanting to fix it because you see these people who love their island, who love their home, and devastation is all around them. But when you go out and you look, you see beautiful sunsets, you see gorgeous rainbows, and you can see how they’re working so hard to put their community back together. It just made me want to do as much as I possibly could to make it better for them from that hurricane. And then, walking into a situation where, here, you have this great opportunity and this great thing that just happened to you, and this hurricane with the same name came in and devastated all of these people, it honestly made me feel some kind of way. I always try to look at things in a positive and a godly way. I always tell people when you’re mixing up a cake, you dump all of this stuff in a bowl together, and it’s all mixed up, and it looks a hot mess. You’ve got eggs and sugar and butter and flour, and it just looks a mess, but when you pour it in a pan and you put it in the oven, you get this beautiful thing out. To me, that is what happens when you go through these trials. It looks like a mess right now, but when it all comes together and at the end of the day, it’s going to be a beautiful island again. I’m trusting and believing that for them. Do you think shows like MasterChef have raised the palate of America? I think so. I think it gives a different edge to what people think when they think about culinary arts and when they think about a chef, and it gives a different perspective because we’re home cooks. There are phenomenal home cooks and people who never get notoriety, and they’re making beautiful dishes in their homes. So, I think that it gives you an open mind to different types of cuisines and the things that people are doing with food. They’re being very innovative. You saw it on our season. Nick was out of the box, like totally, completely out of the box. And then you had some people who played it extremely safe, and then you had those people who were on the borderline of trying things that they never did, like myself. It should open up people’s minds to how big this world that we live in is and the passion that we have. The MasterChef kitchen has all these ingredients that you’ve never cooked with before. Do they give you instruction on how to use them, or do they have somebody you can turn to for advice? But you’re not allowed to use recipes, right? If it’s something that you just are not familiar with, then, yes, you can ask questions, but in my mind, I wanted to touch as much stuff that I didn’t know about as possible because I knew, once I got home, I wouldn’t have this opportunity again. Some of it’s really expensive. Some of it, yeah. You want to be able to say, I did that, I touched it, I actually cooked with it, or I tasted it. We were encouraged, if you see it, grab it, taste it, eat it, because you may never get this opportunity again. The small town where I’m from, I would never get uni. I would never get some of these high-end mushrooms and things of that nature, so you want to be able to experience everything that that kitchen has to offer. Even spices, like saffron is really expensive. Right. There were spices from all over the world, stuff I’d never seen. I know Five Spice is not something that is unique. I know that it’s out there, but where I’m at, I don’t see it. So, when I was in the MasterChef kitchen my first time, I really took to that spice because where I’m at, I don’t get it. That’s what I really loved about being in the kitchen. So, with everything that you’ve been able to taste now, is there one food that you just don’t want to ever eat? I don’t think I could do anything with bugs. I couldn’t. I don’t know if I could eat a cricket or something, even though that’s big in what, Mexico in tacos? I don’t know if I could do the bug thing, but anything else. I’ve already eaten quite a bit of stuff that is strange. MasterChef: Legends airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on FOX.
