“Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber,” the TikTok star Logan Moffitt says of the summer’s most riffable recipe.
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Eric Kim’s first recipe for New York Times Cooking was a cucumber salad.
Logan Moffitt has never been more hydrated.
“Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber,” said Mr. Moffitt, a 23-year-old Ottawa-based content creator, in a video of a cucumber salad recipe he shared on TikTok early last month. Since then, he has posted dozens of videos of himself making a quick meal out of a simple English, or hothouse, cucumber to genuine fanfare. One of his posts has already drawn nearly 27 million views.
Now, fans on the internet simply call him “cucumber guy.”
Mr. Moffitt’s viewers seem entranced by his ability to take an affordable ingredient and twist it into myriad flavor combinations, encouraging people to riff in their own kitchens along the way. With a whole cucumber sliced on a mandoline, he has concocted jalapeño-popper salads, salt and vinegar salads, and smoked salmon with everything-bagel seasoning salads in a deli quart container filled to the brim. After a few minutes of vigorous shaking, he digs into his creations with a pair of chopsticks.
@logagm
Probably one of my fav cucumber recipes
♬ original sound – Logan
Cucumbers have been Mr. Moffitt’s favorite piece of produce for some time. “I’ve been eating them like candy since I was a kid,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Before his newfound virality, Mr. Moffitt, who began cooking for his family at 14, had primarily used his TikTok account for laid-back cooking videos, drawing inspiration from television hosts like the English chef Jamie Oliver and the popular YouTube cook Laura Vitale. But he cites the Korean cooking doyenne Maangchi as most responsible for his cucumber quest.
There’s more to these videos’ appeal than the seasonality of cucumbers in the Northern Hemisphere.
@logagm
Din tai fung cucumber today 🫢
♬ original sound – Logan
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