Just three hours of iced-bun-stacking and mille-feuille baking launched Nadiya Hussain into the culinary spotlight. After winning Season 6 of “The Great British Baking Show” in 2015, the chef’s culinary career took off. The story of her unlikely rise is told in her new memoir, Finding My Voice.
After her high-profile TV victory, Hussain moved her family from West Yorkshire to London. She has since shown off her talents in homeware collections. She has also hosted multiple BBC cooking shows on the BBC and even baked the cake for Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday party.
Hussain recently announced tour dates to discuss her memoir, which will be released later this month.
Nadiya Hussain Started With Small Potatoes
Hussain has made the most of her newfound culinary celebrity status. But she has not forgotten where that career began. Long before she began crafting extravagant pastry creations, Hussain lived off tinned spuds (small potatoes) in order to save cash.
As she reveals, “Seven or eight years ago there was a moment in my life where I really wanted to eat potatoes, I could live on potatoes.” The mother of three had no other choice. “I had to choose between if I wanted to rack up the gas bill and boil potatoes.”
Even now, Hussain controversially uses canned goods in her cooking to show that good food does not have to be expensive and time-consuming.
Opening Up About Family Life
As the Season 6 Finale of “The Great British Bake-Off” revealed, one of Nadiya’s most enthusiastic supporters was her husband Abdal. While the parents are happily married and enjoying their new life in London, the pair barely knew each other when they first married.
Before their arranged marriage, the couple had only met once before. In an interview with Loose Women, Nadiya laughed that her husband had a long ponytail the first time she saw him. “We got rid of that as soon as we got married,” she jokes.
The arranged-couple has made a successful life in London’s culinary scene. But when it comes to her children, Hussain admits she would not want the same fate for them. “I’d happily let them go and find their own partners,” she reveals. “I do not need the hassle of finding them a husband or a wife, for God’s sake!”
Nadiya Hussain Speaks Out About her Background
As a first-generation Brit of Bengali heritage, Hussain absorbed both the flavors of her father’s South Asian dishes and British suburban amenities. However, like many, adolescence was a trying time in her life.
At age 14, she began to wear a hijab. Hussain attributes this not to religious conviction, but mostly to social anxiety. She wanted to cover up her “bad hair more than anything else,” she explains. Her parents questioned the decision.
“It wasn’t easy for them, I have to admit. I was the only child in my school wearing a headscarf. My mum said: ‘What’s wrong with her? Why does she want to cover her hair?’ And I said: ‘Well, I don’t care what society thinks, I wear it because I want to.’”
Hussain’s anxiety was exacerbated by several incidents of racist bullying in school. But these traumatic experiences also strengthened her resilience, which came in handy as she entered the spotlight on national TV. The whole story is told in Finding My Voice, (due out October 17) and its associated publicity tour, which runs through December across Great Britain.
