How We Eat: CucumberJulie Van Rosendaal/The Globe and Mail
Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber. Ottawa TikTok superstar Logan Moffitt will show you the best way to do it.
Back in early July, Moffitt posted a video in which he sliced an entire large English cucumber into a one-litre deli container using a mandoline, added soy sauce, fish sauce, sugar, MSG, sesame oil, garlic, green onions and sesame seeds, and shook it up – “shake, shake, shake” – before crunching the slices down with chopsticks, directly from the container, slurping the juices left in the bottom.
Though he had been posting cooking content before, his social-media audience loved it, and he carried on with cuke videos: always starting with “sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber. … Let me show you the best way to do it”; always using a mandoline and deli containers; always adding a generous shake of MSG, “obviously”; always shaking it up and slurping it down into the camera. People around the world are eating them up – Moffitt’s videos have millions of views, many of them tens of millions, and as of this writing his TikTok account (@logagm) sits at six million followers. His Instagram another 1.5 million.
Yes, crunchy, juicy cucumbers are appealing – as is the idea of eating an entire one yourself – and there is comfort in familiarity: in his deadpan intro, his process, his “MSG, obviously” catchphrase. (Monosodium glutamate is a flavour enhancer – the sodium salt of glutamic acid, one of the most common naturally occurring amino acids, these days made with fermented ingredients such as sugar cane, sugar beets, cassava and corn, and used as a flavour enhancer in everything from Doritos to crackers to cured meats, as well as in home kitchens and restaurants.) And Moffitt’s free-pouring cooking style is intuitive and liberating; he makes the home cook feel like it’s something they could do – slicing, pouring and shaking everything up to eat standing at the counter, which, let’s face it, is how we all eat much of the time.
Logan-style Sliced and Shaken Cukes
Most of Moffitt’s cucumbers are shaken with Asian ingredients such as soy sauce, chili and sesame oil. In another video he uses rice vinegar instead of fish sauce, and in others he adds a spoonful of peanut butter or a squeeze of Kewpie mayo – rich, squeezable Japanese mayonnaise made with egg yolks. (Since he doesn’t measure, but free-pours many of the the ingredients, I visually estimated the quantities he doesn’t specify.)
- 1 large cucumber
- Soy sauce (he says about 1 1/2 tablespoons in his initial video)
- Fish sauce or rice vinegar – about 1 tbsp
- Sugar – about 2 tsp
- MSG – about 1 tsp
- Sesame oil – “a lot” – about 2 tbsp
- 1-2 garlic cloves, grated or chopped
- Toasted sesame seeds – 1-2 tbsp
- A big pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)
Thinly slice your cucumber using a knife or mandoline – directly into a one-litre deli container if you want to be authentic.
Add the remaining ingredients – the soy sauce, fish sauce or rice vinegar, sugar, MSG, sesame oil, garlic, toasted sesame seeds and red pepper flakes if you want them spicy. Put the lid on the container and shake it up well, then eat directly from the container, drinking the juice left over in the bottom.
Serves one.