Logan's Cucumbers

Two years ago I was mindlessly scrolling TikTok when I hit a video of a guy slicing a cucumber into a deli container. “Sometimes,” he started, “you need to eat an entire cucumber.” I’m listening! The recipe was peanut butter, soy sauce, a grated garlic clove, some MSG, rice wine vinegar, and sesame seeds. I had all the ingredients on-hand and made it the next day. It was delicious.

The guy was Logan Moffitt and he was posting new cucumber recipes almost every day. I started telling people about them. Just three days later, the NY Times published “Ask TikTok’s ‘Cucumber Boy’ How to Prepare a Cucumber”. This helped me calibrate my own awareness of cultural trends: I’m ahead of the Times … but barely.

Slate called Logan’s recipes one of “The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years” (perhaps with a bit of recency bias). They made Iceland run out of cucumbers!

Summer is returning, along with my appetite for entire cucumbers. With this level of acclaim, surely there is a list of Logan’s recipes somewhere on this vast Internet of ours. Apparently not! The closest I could find was a comment in a 1200-calorie-a-day subreddit. I watched all the videos in this playlist, wrote down the ingredients, and made my own list:

Screenshot of Logan's Cucumbers recipe list.

I haven’t tried them all but my current favorites are Peanut Butter 2.0, Tzatziki, and Salt and Vinegar Chip.

Some tips:

  • Make sure you have some MSG.
  • If you use a mandoline, be careful!
  • If you are new to slicing on a mandoline, consider a pair of knife-resistant gloves so you’re less likely to cut yourself.

Boring technical details: I put all the recipes in a JSON file and built a static page using kitajs/html and the tailwindcss CLI. It feels a little silly to have a build step for something this simple but I wanted to use templates and have static output.

Maybe today is the day you need to eat an entire cucumber?