THE GREAT KIWI BAKE
Cooking has always been a big part of Sue Fleischl’s life, acting as a kind of therapy when times were hard and propelling her on a stellar 40-year career. The Great Kiwi Bake Off judge talks to Emma Clifton about dealing with life’s surprises – from a ma
OFF: judge Sue Fleischl copes brilliantly under pressure
It would be fair to say that Sue Fleischl likes a challenge. Whether it’s starting her own business while solo parenting, tackling breast cancer or, as she is on the day of our photo shoot, getting ready for a well overdue hip replacement, she is a woman who’s not easily fazed. In her role as co-judge in The Great Kiwi Bake Off, she’s there to nurture the talents of 12 bakers who are put to the test in a high pressure kitchen (albeit one with a lot of bunting and colourful china). Sue knows all about high pressure – she’s lived it from the get-go. The past 12 months have seen the 56-year-old get married, sell her hugely popular business The Great Catering Company, and film season two of Bake Off. When The Australian Women’s Weekly visits the renovated heritage home she and new husband Michael Booth live in, she is just days into her new life without a full-time job for the first time in almost 40 years and it’s fair to say the change of pace is good, if wildly different from the life she’s led so far.
Sue grew up in a food-loving house – her Viennese-born father Peter was such a passionate foodie that the Fleischls’ home was well-known in the Napier community as the place where beer and olives were consumed in the garden every weekend at midday. After their mother died suddenly when Sue was five, she and her five older siblings helped keep things moving at home, under the tutelage of their beloved father. Hers was a colourful childhood with just the right amount of loving chaos. “We were brought up free-range and organic,” Sue laughs. “I’d go to friends’ houses and their mothers would be trying to take the clothes off me so they could sew up the hems and fix the holes. Having two older sisters, I was the third one to get the dress. We just never thought about it.”
At home, every wall was wallpapered a different pattern, Sue recalls. “We’d get all these different samples and we’d choose the colour and we’d choose the wall and up it would go, with no regard to how the rest of the room looked.” But passion for food was the overriding theme of the household. “We grew figs, we grew olives, we grew all sorts of exotic things. I loved how much passion Dad had for food, how much he enjoyed gathering from the garden.”
Sue’s love of food slowly spilled over from an at-home hobby to a
full-blown obsession when she began cooking classes at intermediate school. The other students would mix their cakes, pop them in the oven and go out to play while they baked until, upon return, the freshly baked cakes would be out of the oven and waiting for them on the counter. This didn’t suit Sue, who started going into the kitchen, removing the cakes herself and testing them before the teacher could do it.
She would also unleash a rapid-fire barrage of questions on the teacher. Why did some cakes act in some ways and others didn’t? Why were they using this type of recipe? Why, why, why?
Around the time she was named Napier Intermediate School’s Cook of the Year, Sue realised what she wanted to do with her life. Her plans were thrashed out around the family kitchen table, at a time when women were expected to be either nurses or teachers.
“Out of fierce frustration, Dad said ‘Right, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it properly.’ He wrote to the top restaurants and hotels in Europe and England, asking if I could have a job.” One hotel replied: the iconic, luxury London hotel The Savoy – as five-star as it gets. So, at 17, after finishing her final year at school she moved to London.
Two things became immediately clear – it was going to incredibly hard, and it was absolutely where she was supposed to be. “I was very competitive. No matter who showed me something, my task was to do it quicker and faster than they could.” She worked her way around all the sections of the kitchen over two years, working the gruelling hours that come with hospitality. “I worked seven days a week most of the time because the pay was so poor,” she recalls. “By the time you’d paid for your train fare and your rent, there was very little left. You’d go to work to earn money and eat, and that’s how you survived.”
In those days, it was not an industry that looked kindly on women. “People couldn’t be bothered with you – you had to prove yourself. I asked a lot of questions. I badgered people: ‘Show me that, why are you doing it like that?’” The relentless curiosity she had directed at her school cooking teacher re-emerged, and it worked. “They would say, ‘No, you can’t do that because you’re a girl,’ and I would say, ‘Yes, I can do it, because I’m a girl.’”
Toughest chef
Among the madness of the Savoy, there was a surprising twist. “There was one person that everybody said, ‘You don’t want to work with him, he’s the toughest guy in the kitchen.’” It should be no surprise that, on hearing this, Sue bowled right up to the difficult head chef and asked to work with him. “They put me on the section with this man and I worked with him; he worked me very, very hard.” She pauses, then grins. “And I ended up marrying him.” Sue moved back from London, he followed her and they married. “We weren’t married for long, we were together for nine years and married for half of that,” she says. “But we are very, very good friends and we have a daughter, who lives in America and I am very proud of her.”
The breakdown of her marriage was difficult, but she knew she would get through it. “Growing up as a little girl, you think you’re going to get married and live happily ever after – and when that doesn’t happen, it’s quite shattering,” she says. “I remember saying to my friends: this isn’t in my life plan. But I wanted to be the best role model I could be for my daughter.”
Being a single mother to Dominique meant that 60-hour working weeks were not sustainable. Someone suggested Sue try catering, and after brief horror at the idea of “terrible railway sandwiches”, she decided to give it a go. The industry welcomed her – professional chefs didn’t tend to move into catering; it was seen as beneath them. But the hours were great and Sue was determined to raise the status of catering. She set up her own company in Melbourne before moving back to New Zealand, so her daughter could spend more time with her cousins. After a short sojourn working for catering companies here, Sue started up on her own. “I bought a stainless steel bench and stuck it in the corner of my living room, and I called myself The
Great Catering Company.” That was 1995. In the 24 years that followed it became a market leader, and Sue was inducted into the Restaurant Association Hall of Fame.
“I loved it – I loved the excitement, the thrill, the diversity. I loved the wedding market, I loved going into people’s homes and creating beautiful, memorable dinners.”
The company, Sue says, became part of many people’s lives and families. It is an industry dedicated to making people happy, she says, and happiness is important. And sometimes, it’s a lifesaver. In 2012, Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer and she credits two aspects of her personality for helping her make it through. Number one, a positive disposition. “I’ve always felt that I’m a happy person, I always look on the bright side of life, and it was amazing how much that changed everything.” Secondly, she does not muck around. Breast cancer had long been in the Fleischl family, so Sue had felt it was a case of “when”, not “if”. “I was ready to face it,” she says. “And I was aggressive with the choices about what I wanted. I was very firm with my surgeon.” He had suggested a lumpectomy but she wanted a double mastectomy immediately.
Do it once, and do it properly, she decided. Afterwards, when they tested her tissue, it turned out she had made the right call: the cancer had spread further than the doctors first thought.
While going through the treatment, Sue wanted to reduce some of the fear around the subject. “When I wore the scarves, I obviously looked like someone who was going through cancer, people took a wide berth of me. It was quite a phenomenon. People with their trolleys at the supermarket would quickly go to the other side of the aisle, as if they didn’t want their children to see me. So I thought, ‘I’m going to be really bold with this. I’m going to show my bald head and I’m going to rock it.’”
“The best trick I used,” – she starts laughing – “is that I indulged in spray tans. So I didn’t get that sort of grey look that people get when they go through cancer. And I always put on make-up, I always dressed bright and colourful and I walked with confidence.”
It may sound strange, but Sue was determined to enjoy the process as much as possible. “I was really worried when it came to having my first chemo treatment and a dear friend told me to try and embrace the chemo, to welcome it into my body because it was going to make me better. And it totally changed my mind-set.” Rather than resenting or fearing the chemo, she treated it as the lifesaver it was. “You just deal with it all as best you can.”
Unexpected love
A few years after she went through breast cancer came another surprising life event: Sue fell in love. Michael, a surgeon, had been loosely in her neighbourhood’s circle for years as “the quiet guy who lived down the road”. One night, they were seated together at a mutual friend’s dinner party. “He was just this lovely, lovely guy and I was thrilled when he asked me out for dinner.” Around Anzac day last year, Michael proposed. “I never thought I’d get married again, because I never quite met the person that I thought I could spend the rest of my life with,” she says, smiling. “But it was different with Michael. He’s just a gorgeous, gorgeous person who always makes me feel happy. So when he did propose, it was like ‘of course I will.’ I didn’t think twice about it.
“My family were over the moon and his friends were really delighted, which was lovely. Quite often when you’re middle-aged and you’re getting married the second time around, there can be people that don’t accept that. But all his friends just welcomed me.”
As someone who has planned many weddings, Sue knew exactly what she wanted for her own – even if she and Michael did make the classic error of slightly underestimating the size of the guest list. “It was going to be either a dinner party or a long lunch for 40 people in the house,” she says, gesturing towards the garden. “The house” is a heritage Chapman-Taylor home Michael bought in 2016 that they have spent two years renovating. “Then we realised that wouldn’t fit. So it grew and grew and we ended up having 194 people.” They were married last December at Abbeville Estate, a property Sue has managed since 2012. They feasted on summery foods: fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, whitebait fritters. “It was the most perfect day.”
It also helped shepherd in a year of big changes. In July this year, Sue began filming the second season of The Great Kiwi Bake Off, a show she adores being part of. “It was an honour to be asked, it’s such a lovely, feel-good programme,” she says. The on-screen team of Dean Brettschneider, Madeleine Sami, Hayley Sproull and Sue have become close friends and Sue is all about promoting the benefits of home-baking to Kiwi audiences. “We grew up baking at home; even though I didn’t do it with my mother, I did it with my sisters. They got to do all the fun stuff and I had to do all the measuring and the dishes,” she laughs. “It’s a lovely thing to do at home and I always baked with my daughter.
It’s very therapeutic.”
Being part of the joyful Bake Off bubble again also helped cushion Sue when she sold her company. “I always think there’s a time in your life where you need to pass your business along to new people who have got more energy,” she says. “Sometimes I think business owners hold onto their businesses for too long, and I didn’t want to be one of those people. It was heart-wrenching, but I had to keep reminding myself: ‘You can’t do this forever.’” She sold the business in August and went on holiday to Europe with Michael. Annoyingly, a hip-pain niggle turned into a full-blown problem, but Sue was not surprised by the need for an urgent hip replacement. “When people sell their businesses, their bodies often just go. When I look back on my years doing yoga… I possibly did push things a bit hard,” she grins, knowing that’s an understatement.
“This is the start of my new life,” she says. “I’m looking forward to it. I want to be a wife to my husband and I want to be a friend to my friends.”
Her plans are low-key, including wanting to become a gardener, just like her father. “I had the gardeners here and I was asking, ‘What are you doing? Why?’ and I realised that’s how I was when I started cooking,” she laughs. “I’m always trying to soak up as much as I can. I just want to get back out there and continue to have a full and happy life.” AWW
l The Great Kiwi Bake Off returns to TVNZ 2 on November 3.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to show my bald head and I’m going to rock it.’” Sue Fleischl during her treatment for breast cancer.