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Dominique Woolf, winner of Jamie Oliver’s TV show and author of one of the summer’s hottest cookbooks, is loving the season’s tour of food festivals up and down the country.
It reminds her, she says, of the time she spent as an aspiring rock star, once even appearing with an electronic band in the dance tent at Glastonbury.‘It feels great being onstage again,’ she says. ‘I feel just as happy behind the stove or the wok as I did behind the mic.’
Cookbook writing provides a quieter sort of fame. Last October, when the mother-of-three won Jamie Oliver’s The Great Cookbook Challenge on , with her accessible Asianinspired recipes, it was a dream come true.
‘Jamie’s been my food idol since The Naked Chef went out over 20 years ago.He’s the ultimate entrepreneur,’ says Dominique, 44, who founded her fine food company The Woolf’s Kitchen, during the first in 2020 with a range of spicy sauces and nuts now stocked by Selfridges, Amazon and the Co-op.
Dominique Woolf, (pictured) winner of Jamie Oliver’s TV show and author of one of the summer’s hottest cook books, is loving the season’s tour of food festivals
She was 37 when she swapped the pursuit of rock stardom for motherhood.Two more babies followed in two years. When her third, Grace, was 18 months, she did a lot of soul-searching.
‘I had a bit of an identity crisis. I wasn’t depressed exactly, but I did feel low. I thought: what am I going to do with my life beyond being a mother?’
Then just before her 40th birthday, with three children still under five, she had the idea of launching her own food business.
‘I’m half-Thai and when my first child was born, my auntie would come over and cook us curries and pad Thai, and leave us jars of sauces, including a tamarind sauce.All we had to do was grill a piece of salmon and stir-fry some veg, drizzle over the sauce, and we had an incredible meal.’
Dominique enrolled at Leith’s cookery school in 2019, then used her savings to work with a food scientist on three sauces — Hot+Sour, Tamarind Ketchup and Jalapeño+Lime — selling them at a farmers’ market.
No childcare meant after the children went to bed, she’d often work until midnight.
The mother-of-three felt low after having her kids and wanted more for herself.She explains how she juggled motherhood with pursuing her own dreams
‘My husband Gordon works in IT for an investment bank so I didn’t have the luxury of sharing the load. My children had to come to meetings with me, bribed with TV or a treat.’
She launched Woolf’s Kitchen in June 2020, persuading Selfridges to stock her.(‘I stalked them, basically!’) After four months, she was a finalist in Enterprise Nation’s Female Start-up of the Year Award and last September won four prestigious Great Taste Awards run by the Guild of Fine Food.
Then Dominique read a message on Instagram seeking contestants for a new TV show.‘They said the deadline was the next week, and by the way, Jamie Oliver was hosting. So, I thought, I’ll get my skates on.’
Her prize after the nail-biting final was a cookbook deal with Penguin Michael Joseph, Sportsbook software publishers of Jamie, Nadiya Hussain and Nigella Lawson. Sales rocketed, with turnover since launch at £150,000.
She advises fellow entrepreneurs ‘to network like crazy’.‘It really helps to be able to bounce off ideas.’
Today, Grace is five, Florence, six, and Logan is seven. It’s a handful. ‘The house is messier than I’d like,’ she laughs, ‘and the kids probably watch a little too much TV, but I try not to be too hard on myself.’
She adores her children, but never feels guilty about being ambitious.‘Being a mother is one part of me, but I need this other purpose.’
- Dominique’s Kitchen: Easy Everyday AsianInspired Food by Dominique Woolf (£20, Michael Joseph).