Masterchef Junior Cookbook: Bold Recipes and Essential Techniques to Inspire Young Cooks

Can your kid become a MasterChef? The MasterChef Junior Cookbook would sure like them to try—but they might get burned. Literally. 

The TV show “MasterChef Junior” pits 8 to 13-year-old chefs against one another in a Gordon Ramsay–judged cooking competition that begins its sixth season this year, and is casting for a seventh. The cookbook encourages young chefs to prepare a diverse selection of Michelin-star-worthy adult food with new cooking techniques.

I assigned a few recipes to my partner’s 10-year-old brother, Sam Widseth, for validation. If he could do it, then I’d say the cookbook was doing its job. Sam is an attentive, quiet kid who lives with his family in northern Minnesota; he and his 22-year-old brother Luke loved the idea of bonding over a cooking assignment. They cooked the pan-seared chicken with shoestring fries, the pork chops with apples, carrots and mustard sauce and the gnocchi with brown-butter sage sauce and tomatoes. 

The experience was fun, Sam told me, “but it was hard. I didn’t like the cutting part because I was afraid I would cut myself.” The book has no basics section and little instruction on using knives or appliances—just tips scattered throughout. The cookbook uses hard-to-find ingredients, sometimes requiring online ordering, and several recipes call for appliances you might not have, like pressure cookers or stand mixers.

Then there were instructions that scare even more experienced cooks, such as “Sear the pork chops in hot oil.” Said Sam’s dad, Greg, “With someone who’s 10, pan searing pork chops in high-heat oil is challenging.” 

The Widseths mainly had good things to say about cooking the recipes together, though. “Sam has never had a gnocchi before, let alone one he’d made himself,” said Luke—they ended up tasting good, albeit looking more like logs than pillows. The recipes were trial-by-fire, and Sam picked up the required skills regardless. 

My partner and I also recipe-tested—with varying levels of success and some pain. We prepared braised pork belly with an apple cider glaze, a side of balsamic-glazed carrots and poached pears with a red miso glaze and Meyer lemon cream for dessert. The carrots and pears tasted fantastic, though we folded some confectioner’s sugar into the unsweetened Meyer lemon whipped cream. What nerd likes sugar-free whipped cream?

The pork belly spelled catastrophe. We couldn’t figure out how the recipe’s pressure cooker instructions applied to our Instant Pot’s functions—we went with the meat preset. We seared our two-pound slab of meat in three tablespoons hot oil. Grease popped as we juggled the jiggling mass into the cast-iron skillet, and burned our faces and hands. This recipe wasn’t adult friendly.

The book could have used a more realistic focus on children whose arms barely reach the stovetop. If you want to teach your kid to cook and eat like a MasterChef, they’ll need to learn the basics first. This cookbook is less about offering instructions than it is about showing kids that they can enjoy good food. 

“When we made the pork chops, [Sam] didn’t think he’d like the sauce when we put in the mustard,” said Greg. But when I asked Sam about the dish, the first thing he said was, “I liked the sauce.”