Maui home cook, baker share island favorites on national TV
Relle Lum on ‘Great American Recipe,’ Madame Donut on ‘MasterChef’
Native Hawaiian home cook Relle Lum will showcase her island-inspired cuisine on national television next week, while Maui artisan baker Madame Donut is making her mark on a Fox cooking competition.
Lum of Wailuku will be seen competing against nine chefs beginning Monday in Season 2 of “The Great American Recipe,” a new “uplifting competition that celebrates the multiculturalism that makes American food so vibrant and unique,” according to PBS.
“It was a really, really cool experience,” said Lum, who is a nurse practitioner, wife and mom of two young children. “All the time I tell people, ‘I’m not a chef, I’m a mom that likes to cook,’ and if I can do it, you can do it too.”
Meanwhile, Madame Donut of Wailuku-based shop Donut Dynamite! has advanced to the next round of “MasterChef: United Tastes of America” Season 13, after receiving key votes in Episode 3 from judges Joe Bastianich, Gordon Ramsay and Aaron Sanchez. Episodes have been airing on Fox since May 24.
“I wanted to take a humble, classic Hawaiian staple that everybody knows about and elevate it, and I’m all about using fresh ingredients and supporting local,” said Madame Donut, who impressed the judges with an ahi tuna musubi with crispy sushi rice. “I’m an emigrant, I was not born in Hawaii, but as soon as I moved here I felt so at home and I really embraced the land.
“I wanted to be out there representing other flavors that aren’t your typical pasta or your Eurocentric dishes,” she added. “We say America is a melting pot, well, we are a part of the melting pot, so I want to represent us who have been underrepresented for so long.”
FOOD IS LIFE
Lum was born and raised on Maui in a single-parent home. She has fond memories of baking with her mother and being in charge of the desserts for family get-togethers and holidays.
“So that was kind of our thing — Christmas, Halloween, all those kinds of stuff,” Lum recalled. “And so that’s kind of what got me really into baking. Love sweets, super my thing, you know. Especially in Hawaii, you go family parties, everything’s a potluck, right, so we tended to be the dessert family.”
As Lum grew up, got married and started a family, traditional Hawaiian food became a staple in her everyday recipes. From a picky eater to a self-taught chef of fusion dishes, her passion is creating simple, easy recipes that inspire folks of all ages to cook at home and expand their palate.
A recipe for lilikoi bars, created by Lum’s mother, is what the Wailuku cook is known for, but hamburger steak is her go-to savory meal — and sometimes with the addition of a fried egg and gravy for a traditional loco moco.
“I feel like cooking is kind of a lost skill set,” Lum noted. “You
know, back in the day people could sew, could cook, could change their own tire and oil and stuff like that, and nowadays it’s not as common. … I work a fulltime job, I have this side hustle and kids and if I can still put together a meal and sit down with my family every night to enjoy, you can do it too.”
Some of her must-try recipes are posted on her “Keeping It Relle” website, including ube cheesecake, Hawaiian lomi lomi salmon and a three-ingredient kulolo. She launched the blog and social media pages in 2019 to create a shared space for family members to access her recipes, but it has since grown in popularity.
Recruiters from “The Great American Recipe” sent her a direct Instagram message inviting her to audition for the show.
“My first reaction was, like, ‘This is a scam. Why me?’” she said with a laugh. “I’m very, very happy I went. It was an amazing experience. … Never thought I’d be on TV, never thought I’d be a social media-type of person. Now I go places and people recognize me — it’s very humbling but so weird to have random people come up to me and say, ‘Hi, Relle, can I take a picture with you?’”
Competing on a TV show is “a whole other ball game” as talented home cooks try to beat the ticking clock and out-cook one another in front of a panel of judges, she added.
When the show airs, the cooks will display a wide variety of cooking styles influenced by their backgrounds — from Guyanese to Greek, Libyan to Lithuanian, Caribbean to Native American, Midwestern to traditional Hawaiian, according to PBS.
Hosted by Alejandra Ramos, each episode challenges the cooks to showcase two of their signature dishes as they compete to win the national search for “The Great American Recipe.”
The judges are Leah Cohen, Tiffany Derry and Graham Elliot.
“It was crazy, but I met some amazing people,” said Lum, who cannot share what her creations were just yet. “The competitors from the show, while they were my competition, are still my really good friends, very nice people, from all walks of life, which is cool. You get to meet all these people you otherwise would have not been able to if it weren’t for the show.”
Food is life in Hawaii, and Lum said she hopes that her participation on the show adds to the preservation of Hawaiian culture and cuisine for future generations.
“Being Native Hawaiian, it means the world to me to be able to have this platform, to be able to to share … Back in the day, Hawaiians nearly got wiped off the face of the earth, along with culture and cuisine and all these things,” she said. “And Hawaii as a whole, it has been working really hard to bring that back to where it was and it’s come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. But more so to be able to educate people that, like, putting pineapple on your pizza is not Hawaiian, but let’s talk about what Hawaiian food is and what local food is and really get it out there in the world.”
Lum said she has a watch party planned with her family and friends for when the first episode of “The Great American Recipe” premieres at 9 p.m. on Monday and will run through Aug. 7 on PBS Hawaii. Episodes air every Monday.
DONUT QUEEN
After moving to Maui in 2011, Madame Donut opened up Donut Dynamite! in 2013 as a small pop-up cart before moving into a permanent shop on Lower Main Street a year later. She crafted her delicious creations from local and seasonal ingredients from business owners on the island, and her donuts sold out every Saturday.
“I’ve always wanted to be the person who brought something that people were excited about because they want it, not because they need it,” she said. “I think getting something that you want makes people happier than getting what they need, and I kind of just always wanted to associate whatever
I do with that.”
The love of the sweet treat started at 15 years old while working her first job at Dunkin’ Donuts. Though she is the queen of donuts now, she is no stranger to fine dining cuisine with her culinary education and experience.
Still, Madame Donut, who changed her wellknown nickname to her legal name after a divorce in
hopes of embodying her inner superhero and uplifting others, said, “I’m more of a treat person, I like to be the bringer of treats.”
The fun name embodies a “sexy, strong and smart woman” that helps her to find her own confidence and inspires others to feel the same way, she said.
The donut shop weathered the COVID-19 pandemic and also faced the challenges of owning a small local business on Maui, which led Madame Donut to close her doors in December. Folks can still check donutdyna mite.com for availability, she said.
“It’s hard because Maui is very loving and they support local with love, but the truth is, it’s really hard to do business here, especially for artisanal food,” she said. “We are struggling food artists not making it on Maui, and it’s sad.”
But sometimes with hardship comes positive change. In January, Madame Donut qualified for the competitive cooking show “MasterChef,” which gave her a “bigger voice” on sharing a message about home cooking and sustainability. She has a pop-up planned for Donut Dynamite! in Japan at the end of the month.
“So when ‘MasterChef’ approached me about home cooking, I thought it was a great platform to put out there what I’m trying to do, which is to cook with what you’ve got, you know, cook with what you have available, but make it nice,” she said. “I’ll still have my donuts, of course, but I really want to shift my focus to community work and really teach people how to cook… . I grew up home cooking, I grew up cooking with whatever we had and making it nice.”
Overall, the competitive environment and being on TV helped her “grow a lot” and “opened my eyes to a lot more than I expected.”
“I’m glad I did it, and I feel like this year so far, since the beginning of the year, everything is a pivot for me,” she said. “I just feel like it’s going to be a big year.”
For updates on Madame Donut’s progress on “MasterChef,” watch the upcoming episodes on Fox on Wednesdays. For schedules and past episodes, visit fox. com/masterchef/.