Celebrity MasterChef 2021: Singer Dami Im plays to her strengths in kitchen

Despite being nervous and ill-prepared for Celebrity MasterChef, singer Dami Im reveals she went into the competition with a clever strategy.

There are few things that are certain in Dami Im’s life right now. After all, the talented singer-songwriter has had to cancel almost an entire year’s worth of touring engagements as a result of Covid.

But there’s one thing she can be certain of – the producers of MasterChef did not invite her to be a part of their 2021 celebrity season based on “that YouTube video”.

The clip in question has the 32-year-old preparing a massive cactus leaf to eat in her kitchen.

Thanks to her open obsession with cactuses — the name of her latest song is Lonely Cactus — the singer had heard you could cook the desert plant and eat them.

“Cactus will not be my signature dish,” the bubbly Korean-born singer laughs from her home in Brisbane.

“I’ve come a long way since that experience, it was one of the biggest fails. When I was cooking my cactus, before it came out of the oven I thought ‘Yeah, this is going to be pretty good’ and as soon as I opened the oven I knew I didn’t even want to taste it because of the smell, it was so gross.

Singer Dami Im has joined the cast of Celebrity MasterChef 2021. Picture: Supplied

“But we were filming and I signed up for it so I had to put it in my mouth and as it turns out, my body couldn’t handle it.

“So, never again.”

Im, who emigrated to Australia from Seoul with her mother and little brother Kenny when she was nine, should perhaps have turned to her mother for tips before appearing on the reality cooking show, rather than YouTube.

While she says she will never cook as well as her mother does, she says any success she has in the kitchen is thanks to her mum, a talented cook who wouldn’t flinch at putting together a meal for up to 100 people.

Im is one of 10 celebrities to enter the MasterChef kitchen and while she was nervous and, according to her, ill-prepared for the culinary cook-off, she says she went in with a clever strategy.

She faces off against the likes of radio and television presenter Chrissie Swan, comedian Dilruk Jayasinha, fashion designer Collette Dinnigan, former Olympian Ian Thorpe, actors Matt Le Nevez and Rebecca Gibney, former AFL star Nick Riewoldt, soccer legend Archie Thompson and Tilly Ramsay, daughter of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

“My focus has always been Korean food and my strategy going into (MasterChef) was that I’m Korean, I grew up eating Korean food and nobody there knows Korean food like I do, unlike Italian or something, so they can’t criticise me as much,” she argues.

“That was my plan.

“With normal MasterChef people are used to cooking pretty well, whereas with Celebrity MasterChef I feel like there are varying degrees of experience in the kitchen. We’re a group of people who are good at other things before cooking. But that’s what made it more fun, even though it was stressful at the time.”

Dami Im in the MasterChef kitchen.

Im’s earliest food memories are of being in the kitchen with her mother, learning to cook the spicy fermented vegetable favourite kimchi and Korean BBQ.

There was a period when she and her little brother Kenny were young and her mother went to university to study and wasn’t always there when they got home from school.

Im says her mother would leave her children delicious bowls of fried rice topped with egg for afternoon tea.

Even though she wasn’t there, her mother was showing her love through food and cooking, something Im says has always been an important part of family life.

And even though they discovered years later her mother struggled with the fact she wasn’t home for her children after school, she and Kenny remember those afternoons as the best, thanks to those thoughtful bowls of food.

Even today, when her family get together the conversation is dominated by food and what everyone had for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It seems a good foundation for going to battle in the MasterChef kitchen.

“I was really nervous going into it but I didn’t have a lot of time to actually prepare, so I just had to jump straight into it without too much practice,” she says.

“And when I was in there I was wishing I had practised a bit more and tried different things at home before doing it in that kitchen with the timer ticking away.

“So I had to go with things that I knew already and try and do it without getting too spooked out by the intense energy in that kitchen.”

The cast of Celebrity MasterChef Australia.

It has been a year of mixed blessings for Im on the professional front.

Getting ready to release her new album this month, she had planned a year of touring throughout Australia. All but three shows were cancelled when different states went in and out of lockdown. But the singer who rose to fame suddenly after winning season five of
X Factor Australia in 2013 chooses to see the silver lining in her situation.

“I was meant to tour all through this year from July onwards but that didn‘t happen,” she says.

“But I’ve been focusing on my album, which is going to come out while MasterChef is on.

“(My album is) what I have been putting my heart and soul into this whole season of isolation and I’m looking forward to sharing it this time with everyone. For every touring artist it’s been a really tough time and it’s still going.

“But then I normally am always short on time doing my album, I have to rush because I’m on the road.

“But this year, that was different, I got to focus on the recording side of things. I think (lockdown) provided a new kind of creativity where I just got to really think about my feelings and be vulnerable, more so than in the past where I was maybe going ‘OK, what’s next, bam, bam, bam’.”

* Celebrity MasterChef Australia airs from Sunday, October 10, at 7.30pm on 10, 10 Play and On demand.

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Originally published as Celebrity MasterChef 2021: Singer Dami Im plays to her strengths in kitchen