AMERICA’S latest TV chef cannot reach a cooking pot without standing on a stool and sometimes glances off camera with furrowed brow to ask his mother the name of a spice.

Yet fans from Tokyo to Moscow agree that chef Julian’s spaghetti sauce is “pastalicious”, his roasted olives mouthwatering and his muffins beyond compare. The recipes will appear in his first cookbook later this year.

Chef Julian is a very busy five-year-old.

Julian Kreusser’s twice-weekly cookery show is not only a hit in his home town of Portland, Oregon, but, thanks to the internet, is also becoming known around the world.

“Today on Big Kitchen With Food,” he announced breathlessly last week, “we’re making chocolate chip zucchini [courgette] muffins and we’ll use . . . um . . . what is this?” he asks his mother, who is off screen. He is holding a bottle of vanilla.

Sometimes he completely forgets the camera and takes an entire minute to squeeze honey out of a bottle. At other times the 3ft 9in boy wobbles alarmingly as he stands on a chair before a kitchen counter, wielding pans as big as his head.

Critics worry that he is literally overstretching himself, but his parents say they are always close at hand and his show attracts national attention, with praise in New York magazine and elsewhere.

His father Ben Kreusser, a producer with Portland’s Channel 23, which broadcasts the show, shoots the episodes in their kitchen as Julian’s mother, Kristen McKee, 38, a library website assistant, gives maternal support while his two-year-old sister, Eva, operates the lights.

Viewers love the boy chef, according to Sylvia McDaniel, a spokeswoman for the channel: “He understands what he is doing. He could be big.”

Publishers want a sneak peek at his manuscript, provisionally called My Big Kitchen, and the New York-based Food Network, which turned Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver into household names in America, is keen to invite him on.

Julian’s parents are protective. “This is not us driving this or getting rich. This is all about what he wants to do for fun,” said McKee. “He began asking whether he could cut something up or use some of the tools in the kitchen. He was three when he toasted olives for the neighbours.” Although he is thought to be the first child chef to get his own television show, he is not alone. Kooking With Kasidy, featuring an eight-year-old “food artist” and poet, is popular on the web and last week Jay Leno, the TV chat show host, interviewed another blue-eyed baby chef, eight-year-old Jack Witherspoon.

Jack become hooked on cooking last year when he watched a lot of television while being treated for leukaemia. Now he not only has a deal to write a recipe book for charity but also has the magic ingredient vital to success – an enthusiastic catchphrase: “twist it up”.

McKee is not worried by the competition. “Julian is fearless: he wants to run a restaurant and work at a television station,” she said.

“But who knows what he will want when he turns six in November? That is a long time in his life and by that time he might be cooked out. But right now he is having fun.”

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