I’ve always told parents that even having the best cookbooks for kids in the world won’t make enough difference if your kids don’t have any cooking skills. No one likes feeling frustrated!
And when beautiful pictures in a kid’s cookbook get your child all motivated to cook, they pull out the ingredients and get started — and then they need help on every other step — it really takes the wind out of their sails.
Besides that, I happen to know that some of the more popular cookbooks written for kids are by food bloggers who don’t even have kids and have never ever worked with a child in the kitchen! They wrote cute recipes and took cute pictures, but haven’t a clue how to actually teach kids to cook or help them feel confident in the kitchen.
“Mooooom, I’m hungry!!”
How many times do your kids ask for snacks each day? Wouldn’t it be a relief if they were empowered to prepare their own snacks, instead of coming to you and whining about how hungry they are?
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Because of that, I feel compelled to make a list of the best cookbooks for kids out there, so that your shelf isn’t filled with dusty cookbooks your kids won’t use but rather wonderful options that will truly motivate them.
Plus, around here we have plenty of kids who are full of cooking skills and confidence in the kitchen! They are ready for a kid’s cookbook to keep them moving along instead of as the first step in the process.
Kids Cook Real Food™ Chooses Best Cookbooks for Kids in
Let’s walk through some of the top kids’ cookbooks out there. Many of these we do have in our home, some have been recommended in our community, and others are highly reviewed elsewhere, and I do my best to break it down for you.
As always with Katie Kimball, you’ll get a completely honest and forthright review, so you’ll know which is which as you read through.
Key to cost of the books, although you’ll find many on sale from time to time!
- $ = under $15
- $$ = $15-25
- $$$ = Over $25
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1. Chef Junior
Chef Junior: 100 Super Delicious Recipes by Kids for Kids! by Katie Dessinger, Anthony Spears, Abigail Langford, Paul Kimball, and Will Bartlett
Price: $$
Recipes: 100
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: 5 stars
Chef Junior is the only cookbook written for kids by kids. Five kids between the ages of 12 and 15 compiled this cookbook over the course of a harrowing two years. They are the children of popular real-food bloggers, including yours truly.
So am I biased about this one? Absolutely. What mom wouldn’t be the proudest of a book on which her own kid is listed as an author? However, let me tell you in a more unbiased way why Chef Junior is 100% one of the best:
- Because it’s written by kids, these recipes are definitely kid accessible and presented in a way kids can understand. The authors of Chef Junior label the recipes beginner, intermediate, and advanced (just like our Kids Cook Real Food™ eCourse). This helps kids know how difficult the recipe will be before they even start.
- Most, if not all of the authors, had actual children and families test the recipes and made huge improvements on how they were written.
- If healthy food is important to you, it’s exceptionally hard to find a cookbook for children that’s not full of white flour and sugar. This cookbook is different. Chef Junior is all real food and takes food allergies seriously into account.
Many members of the Kids Cook Real Food™ community have a copy of Chef Junior and I hear often from them about how wonderful it is. I get to see pictures of entire meals made from the book! And even just this month, a member reached out and said Chef Junior is her daughter’s favorite.
I also have to say that I appreciate (and many kids do, too) that this book doesn’t talk down to children. There’s no pandering because the authors are actually children as well. In fact, the kids really got to let their personalities shine through in the headnotes on each recipe. Adults might not even appreciate them, but kids can tell that they’re written by a kid.
The element of positive peer pressure is there as well. Because when a child knows that another kid has made this recipe, it automatically raises their confidence and motivation levels. Your kids can also get to know the authors through some of their podcast interviews and TV segments. Anything you can do to connect your kids to cooking will help them stay engaged in the kitchen.
2. Kid Chef
Kid Chef: The Foodie Kids Cookbook by Melina Hammer
Price: $$
Recipes: 75
Real Food Rating: Medium-High
KCRF Rating: 2 stars
While this cookbook strives to use real food for the most part, it’s just not really a cookbook for kids. The lessons are dry and too sparse for a beginner, and there’s nothing kid-ish about the recipes themselves. (Egg salad and toast points? Ginger-Lemon green juice … without any explanation on how to peel ginger?)
I dug in a little to this one and discovered that it’s written by a food blogger who takes beautiful photos … who doesn’t have kids. She’s never taught kids or worked with them!
She was just hired by a publisher who saw a hole in the market for a children’s cookbook. Ouch! I could tell it wasn’t ideal by looking at the Amazon preview, and a team member here at Kids Cook Real Food™ also has a copy and confirmed my assessment.
Perhaps for a teen who wants to refine their cooking, this would work, but I can’t see handing it to my 7-year-old or even 10-year-old.
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It can be hard to find healthy snacks that you can take with you on the go. When I want the convenience of a jerky stick, but want a healthy, protein-packed snack option, I grab Paleovalley meat sticks. Paleovalley ingredients have these high standards that you can feel good about:
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- Non-GMO
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*With the exception of Teriyaki, which contains 2 grams of sugar from Organic Honey.
These beef sticks and turkey sticks taste delicious! My favorite is the Jalapeño but my kids love Summer Sausage.
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3. Cooking Class
Cooking Class: 57 Fun Recipes Kids Will Love to Make (and Eat!) by Deanna F. Cook
Price: $$
Recipes: 57
Real Food Rating: Medium
KCRF Rating: 4 stars
Deanna F. Cook is a mom to two, and it shows in her first book in the Cooking Class series (she’s also written Baking Class, Cooking Class Global Feast, and the upcoming Kids Cook Dinner). The book features recipes kids like to eat and cook while not resorting to too much processed food.
You’ll definitely find recipes with sugar and white flour but also avocado and spinach as well as recipes for homemade guacamole, salad dressings, and fruit leather.
The colorful pages offer fun ideas, like visiting an apple orchard to pick your own apples, and the book includes adorable stickers and recipes cards. Recipes are also marked one, two, or three spoons to indicate skill level. A member of my team has this book and is enjoying it!
4. Master Chef Junior Cookbook
Master Chef Junior Cookbook: Bold Recipes and Essential Techniques to Inspire Young Cook
Price: $$
Recipes: 100
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: 2 stars (maybe 1?)
My daughter Leah gave her review of this book, which started with her wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“Mom, the recipes are ALL too fancy. I don’t think I’d like any of them!” she assessed. “It’s like it’s not even written for kids. Plus it definitely doesn’t do any teaching to learn skills, so lots of kids couldn’t even start trying to use it.”
I flipped through it pretty extensively, and although it does make us want to watch the show, I agree that it’s not kid-friendly (nor Katie-friendly!). I’m not sure if there was a single recipe we could have made with the real food ingredients we have stocked in the house.
From fresh herbs to many cuts of meat I’ve never even purchased, the recipes are VERY “fancy,” as Leah described. They’re all directly from the show, so if you’ve ever watched MasterChef Junior on TV, you have an idea.
The entire chapter on pasta is inaccessible if you don’t have a pasta maker. There’s a whole seafood chapter that would definitely help raise adventurous eaters, but I’m not sure I’m even that adventurous to risk disliking a recipe and spending so much on ingredients.
The “snacks” chapter cracked me up because there was all sorts of seafood in there as well. I’m not sure there was a single recipe in that chapter that I could see a child making for a snack.
Bottom line is that this is a gorgeous book with impressive photography and even more impressive recipes, but unless your family watches MasterChef Junior regularly and just wants to feel a part of it, I would skip this one entirely.
5. The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs
The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs: 100+ Recipes that You’ll Love to Cook and Eat from America’s Test Kitchen
Price: $$
Recipes: 100+
Real Food Rating: Medium-High
KCRF Rating: 4.5 stars
Another cookbook that my daughter received as a gift, and this one is MUCH better than the previous one. Leah has made a few recipes from this book put out by America’s Test Kitchen, and she reports that she absolutely loved both of them.
She has quite a few other recipes marked with Post-its because she wants to try them, which is always a good sign for a cookbook. The book includes mini teaching and safety tips all throughout the book and provides some “process” photos to help kids learn the skills needed for each recipe.
The photos, fonts, and layouts are very engaging, and ATK quotes kid-testers who made sure the recipes were spot on. The food is very accessible, with plenty of kid-friendly real food ideas like hummus, guacamole, flatbread pizza, and hot chocolate. The book can also stretch kids a little with ideas like sesame noodles with snow peas and carrots, apple cider-glazed pork chops, and roasted zucchini zoodles.
We can’t give it 5 stars only because all the baking recipes use white flour (although Leah knows she could experiment with half whole wheat), white sugar, and doesn’t really take allergies into account. However, even with a dairy or gluten sensitivity, there are plenty of recipes in the book that are naturally GF/DF or could be adjusted with a simple tweak like using almond milk in the oatmeal, for example.
If you’re looking for a basic cookbook for kids that will teach skills and build their recipe base, this book is great!
6. New Favorites for New Cooks
New Favorites for New Cooks: 50 Delicious Recipes for Kids to Make by Carolyn Federman
Price: $$
Recipes: 50
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: 5 stars
This cookbook is written by a chef who is the founder of Charlie Carts, an amazing real food cooking program for kids. I love that there are 50 recipes, all real food, and every one we have tried has been incredibly delicious!!
Carolyn teaches with photos along the way, and because she’s taught thousands of kids to cook in real life, she knows exactly how to explain techniques to kids. The photos are engaging, and the recipes are definitely a perfect stretch from what kids already enjoy to what they need to nourish their bodies.
I’d highly recommend this book for your kids!
7. Anise Loves GREEN Food
Anise Loves GREEN Food by Nathalie Curobba
Price: $
Recipes: about 20
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: 5 stars
A kid’s picture book about a little boy who loves to draw and his sister who loves to cook, so perfect for Kids Cook Real Food™! Leah has made almost every recipe in the book, and we love it so much!
For young children, this is a great book to encourage interest in healthy food through narrative, the way young kids learn. The recipes aren’t dumbed down, so kids under 7 will need to create their green food with a parent, but what a lovely Saturday plan.
Leah made green soup, smoothies, cupcakes, and salad, and every recipe was a winner. We can’t recommend this book enough for families with young children, and better yet, families with young children of the picture book age and older siblings who could make the food independently. 😉
8. The International Cookbook for Kids
4 Ways to Yummy: Children’s Vegetable Cookbook by Heide Linde Horeth
Price: $$
Recipes: over 50
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: 4
Written by a member of our very own community, this is a great option for food exploration and picky eaters. It focuses on most people’s least favorite (but best for them!) food group.
Each of a dozen featured vegetables is prepared in 4 totally different ways, giving your family not only nearly 50 veggie recipes BUT demonstrating to children that one food can taste very differently when prepared certain ways.
The care taken with this book is obvious, and the anecdotes and facts are lovely. The 4-star rating is simply because it doesn’t include any color photographs of the food, and for kids, they’ll eat with their eyes first. This book feels exactly like a cookbook I might have perused as a child in the 1980s. Although I’m not sure those books would ever have included kale, squash hummus, or “Collie Flower” Pizza Crust!
If you want a simple book with delightful veggie recipes, fun facts, and whimsical illustrations, this 5-star rated book (on Amazon) is for you!
9. The Totally Awesome Ultimate Kids’ Cookbook (and The Ultimate Kids’ Baking Book)
The Totally Awesome Ultimate Kids’ Cookbook and The Ultimate Kids’ Baking Book by Tiffany Dahle
Price: $$
Recipes: 85 and 60
Real Food Rating: Medium-Low and Medium-High
KCRF Rating: 5
Leah immediately marked a bunch of pages in the cookbook and dove right into the baking book. Recipes that caught her eye include Orange-blueberry pancakes, Peanut butter cup granola bites, Tex-mex sweet potato and sausage skillet, and Sweet and spicy shredded pork. Tiffany has two girls of her own who are often in the kitchen, and the “mom” in her shows.
I love that each recipe in the cookbook has a “play with it!” section that encourages kids to mix things up, make adaptations, and learn about how flavors work together (or don’t). Three cheers for creativity!!
In the baking book, there’s a really helpful pictorial tutorial section for all sorts of techniqes, from what “folding” means to the best way to roll out dough. The full-color, mouth-watering photos for every single recipe are exactly what a child needs to draw them into the book, and Tiffany writes directly to kids in a very accessible style.
I rated the cookbook medium-high on the real food rating because while plenty of the ingredients are right from the ground, there’s still a lot of white flour and there’s nothing in particular about the books that’s allergy-friendly. In the baking book, it’s pretty standard for treats and sweets – white flour and sugar with canola oil and corn syrup occasionally. At least your kids will be baking from scratch with a book written just for them, but don’t expect “healthier” treats here.
The books are beautiful though, and I was thrilled to see them in a brand new local bookstore in my hometown!
10. The Munchy Munchy Cookbook for Kids
The Munchy Munchy Cookbook for Kids by Pierre A. Lamielle
Price: $$
Recipes: over 28
Real Food Rating: Medium
KCRF Rating: 2-3
This book is FUN, especially for little boys. It’s boy humor – I should know, I have 3 of them.
Written in messy comic book style, the “characters” in the book argue, teach, and philosophize (“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is a two-page spread at the start of the breakfast section, for example.)
For me, it’s too frenetic to be helpful. I feel like the photos and illustrations and recipes are just everywhere on the page. BUT your kids can learn basics like nut butter and ketchup, which may help them understand where their food comes from. There are also “recipes” for scrambled, fried, and boiled eggs, which I think are best taught via video or at least step-by-step photos, not text + illustrations.
Sooooo…if your litle boy loves Dog Man and you’d love to get him in the kitchen, consider this book. (Layout is a binder with spiral binding on the inside, so it will lay flat in your kitchen.) You don’t need 100 recipes…just a few that he’s willing to try.
11. The International Cookbook for Kids
The International Cookbook for Kids by Matthew Locricchio
Price: $$
Recipes: 60
Real Food Rating: High
KCRF Rating: unknown yet
We haven’t tried this book, but it steps up to some harder recipes for ages 8+, and all made from scratch.
This book gets incredible reviews on Amazon and looks like a great resource for kids to not only cook but learn something about other cultures at the same time. Our homeschoolers love connecting cooking with geography and social studies!
12. My First Kitchen Binder for Kids
My First Kitchen Binder (for Kids) from Proverbial Homemaker
Price: $$
Recipes: 10
Real Food Rating: Medium
KCRF Rating: unknown yet
This digital download provides you with a 130-page file teaching kids about cooking and entertaining. There are party invitations, activities to do, and lots about cooking terminology and skills.
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Here are a few other cookbooks recommended by the Kids Cook Real Food™ community that I haven’t seen myself:
- Fix-It-and-Forget-It Cooking with Kids: 50 Favorite Recipes to Make in a Slow Cooker by Phyllis Good
- The Nourishing Traditions Cookbook for Children by Sally Fallon Morell and Suzanne Gross
- Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels by Mally Katzen
- ChopChop: The Kids’ Guide to Cooking Real Food with Your Family by Sally Sampson
- Usborne Start to Cook
Other Cookbooks Kids Can Benefit From
Who says kids should only cook from cookbooks made for kids?
For older tweens and teens or any kid ready to level up, here are some suggestions from our community for excellent “basics” cookbooks. We don’t necessarily mean basic recipes, but foundational building block textbooks that will help kids really improve their cooking chops and enjoy their food:
- How to Cook Everything The Basics: All You Need to Make Great Food — With 1,000 Photos by Mark Bittman
- Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat (I have this book and wish I had more time to spend with it! Learning the scientific background of cooking may really vault your kids into an understanding of how to create their own recipes and have success with others’ recipes every time.)
- The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook
- How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart
- Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen
If you’d like to shop at Bookshop, I have a list over there with books for kids cooking, books written by my #LifeSkillsNow camp leaders, and my Healthy Parenting Connector guests. Check it out!
Are there any great cookbooks for kids that we missed? Let me know your favorites!
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About Katie Kimball
Katie Kimball, CSME, creator of Kids Cook Real Food™ and CEO of Kitchen Stewardship®, LLC, is passionate about connecting families around healthy food. As a trusted educator and author of 8 real food cookbooks, she’s been featured on media outlets like ABC, NBC and First for Women magazine and contributes periodically on the FOX Network.
Since 2009, busy moms have looked to Katie as a trusted authority and advocate for children’s health, and she often partners with health experts and medical practitioners to stay on the cutting edge. In 2016 she created the Wall Street Journal recommended best online kids cooking course, Kids Cook Real Food™, helping thousands of families around the world learn to cook. She is actively masterminding the Kids’ Meal Revolution, with a goal of every child learning to cook.
A mom of 4 kids from Michigan, she is also a Certified Stress Mastery Educator, member of the American Institute of Stress and trained speaker through Bo Eason’s Personal Story Power.
Unless otherwise credited, photos are owned by the author or used with a license from Canva or Deposit Photos.