Celebrating Our Sistahs Young MasterChef winner is reaching for the stars

Show helped Keziah Whittaker overcome anxiety, now she’s changing her career goals with dreams of going into catering and owning a restaurant

By John Bosman

LAW STUDENT Keziah dish. She added: “I’ve grown so much from it, so I’m just excited to see what’s to come next.”

Whittaker, 21, says winning the BBC’s Young MasterChef show has helped her overcome anxiety, and reassess her career goals.

Now she’s changing course and is determined to get into catering with dreams of owning a restaurant and a food brand in supermarkets. Her fusion cooking impressed judges Poppy O’Toole and Kerth Gumbs, with Poppy declaring that Keziah creates “sunshine on a plate”.

She beat 21 other aspiring chefs to scoop the top prize with her Caribbean shrimp and coconut curry soup, garnished with coriander, lime and chilli, and served in coconut shells, followed by Jamaican sea bass with escovitch vegetables roasted in jerk and beurre balance sauce, washed down with a coconut mojito.

She spent a lot of her childhood in the kitchen with her mum, who runs a catering and food delivery company. Her favourite is jerk salmon, but she also loves a roast dinner with mac and cheese, rice and peas, plantain and “the full shabang”.

Speaking about how the TV show transformed her personally, Keziah said: “I found it very daunting because I suffer from extreme anxiety and I was like ‘it’s now or never; if I don’t face my fears now I never will’, which is why I jumped in head-first.

NEW GOALS: Keziah Whittaker has big plans for the future

“And I’m so glad that I did because I proved to myself that I can do stuff I never thought I would do. I feel like a lot of it is mind over matter.

Keziah, from north-west London, told The Voice that winning the TV show was “surreal”.

“It was just so overwhelming, I kept crying, I couldn’t breathe. I just feel extremely blessed.”

Her mum, Tanya, was in tears too, and is bursting with pride for her daughter. So much so, that she tells people about Keziah winning Young MasterChef wherever she goes.

Self-confessed ‘foodie’ Keziah revealed that her granddad taught her how to cook her first

What scares me is the thought of something going wrong, and I worry about things that were never going to happen. So when I was on the show all the bad things that I thought were going to happen weren’t happening.”

The law and psychology student at Nottingham University said her sole focus will be food once she finishes her degree, with a cookbook, her own brand of sauces and seasonings, and her own catering business the first goals.