Iron Chef Judy Joo on quitting a high-flying career in finance to pursue her passion for cooking
The Korean-American owner of Jinjuu Korean restaurant in Hong Kong and host of Food Network’s Korean Food Made Simple, who swapped the trading floor for the kitchen, talks about how she ended up on television
What are your childhood memories around food? “Dad would only eat Korean food, so my mom forced my older sister and me to help cook things in copious quantities.”
“I grew up in New Jersey, back when you couldn’t find anything pre-made and Korean ingredients were rare in a very white neighbourhood. Mom was always making kimchi, and our laundry room smelled funky because she was soaking tripe or making fermented rice wine from scratch. We had seaweed drying in the garage, so it was embarrassing having people over. But I loved to eat the food.”
“I remember having to make hundreds and hundreds of dumplings once a quarter, and mom would systematically freeze them on trays. I was probably not good at it because I’d put in too much or too little meat, and I couldn’t seal them correctly.”
Why did you switch from engineering to finance? “My mom was a chemist and my dad a physician, and they expected us to have a good, stable job. My sister went to Yale; I didn’t get into Yale and went to Columbia.”