MasterChef Junior champ Logan Guleff pens his first cookbook

We first met Logan Guleff back in 2009, when his peanut butter turkey burgers won him a trip to New York in a Jif contest. Maybe that doesn’t sound so far back, but for Logan, it was almost half a lifetime ago. The 14-year-old, who has gone on to numerous other accomplishments, was 8 back then.

At 9, winning another cooking contest took him to the White House and earned him a spot at the first Kids’ State Dinner, where he met President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

At 10 (really earlier), he was working on his line of seasonings, Logan’s Rub.

He became a national sweetheart when he took home the title of MasterChef Junior at 11, and then there was the cooking at the James Beard House as a winner in the Blended Burger Project. He’s gone to India to judge the International Young Chef Olympiad and he pops up here and there, judging contests around town.

Oh yeah, he was named Southern Living's Best New Southern Cook of the Year. And earned a spot on Fortune magazine's 10 Under 18 list and Time magazine's Most Influential Teens of 2016 -- along with a couple of young women named Sasha and Malia Obama.

But what he’s been devoted to for the past year, maybe a little more, is his first cookbook, one he insisted on self-publishing because he wanted to do it his way.

“Logan’s Chef Notes & Half-Baked Tales: Cooking Dreams” is a graphic cookbook and adventure series, written and packaged by Logan and illustrated by Cindy Tan, another teen, this one half the world away in Indonesia.

“I really wanted my first cookbook to be me, to really reflect who I am, and I felt like the way to do that was to just do something crazy and do it myself,” he said. “And I’m working with someone so far away, doing everything remotely. It was really mind-blowing.”

And Jessica Biel wrote the foreword.

“My grandmother told me I really needed a foreword, so I thought about a chef, but then I thought about Jessica Biel and said that would be really cool, so I found her people and then I found her.”

But Graham Elliot, one of the chef judges from MasterChef Junior, also penned kind words in the introduction:

“The most important thing for a chef or any artist, really, is to find their own voice. Even though it usually takes years for one to find it, Logan has been lucky enough to discover his early and even luckier for us, he is able to share it in this new book,” Elliot wrote.

The book starts out a graphic novel—a comic book—of Logan climbing a cliff to deliver a new dish to a wise master, who tastes and tells him he’s ready for a bigger challenge, that he needs a team. Over the pages, three cooks are recruited—they’re all called Loganites—to open a restaurant, helped by a magic black cat named Sheffield, or Shef for short.

There are a few recipes in the back of the book, and Logan plans to make more available online. You can buy the book at loganschefnotes.com, where you’ll also find more recipes. Later this week, it will be available at Burke’s Books, 936 S. Cooper.

“That’s the one complaint I’ve gotten, that I should have more recipes,” he said. “But I wanted to really show how, step-by-step, to make the ones I used.”

In the book, he tells a brief history of rice, and that takes us to his next venture. He’s busy shooting a series of videos starring Ulysses T. Cook, a professor played by Logan who tells the history of food and related thing, from facts to folklore. He’s recorded about half a dozen and wants to get a few more ready before he takes them live, so he knows he has enough to release as a series. So far he’s tackled subjects ranging from tea, the frying pan to the history of cookbook.

And he’s inked a deal with Chef’d, a meal-delivery service in the vein of Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. The difference with this service is that many of the meals are chef-designed, and you can order what you want by the meal, not by subscription.

“The meal I have now is the James Beard Burger, the Mushroom Monster Burger, but I have others coming,” he said.

Speaking of burgers. Logan cooked just last year at Beard, part of a project that promotes the use of mushrooms for at least half the beef in a burger. It’s a contest where chefs around the country compete and his was one of a few burgers chosen to be served at dinner. When he was there, he went on the “Today” show.

“It was wild, because when I went to New York for the Jif contest, I went on the “Today” show with my peanut butter turkey burger, and there I was, five years later, back on with another burger.”