At The Table With: Miles Platt, MasterChef Junior Competitor & Cooking Instructor
Instagram: @miles_platt
Miles Platt (He/Him)
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When people tell Miles Platt he can’t do something because he has a limb difference, he has a standard response: “Oh yeah, watch me.”
Miles is thirteen years old and lives in College Station, Texas. He has competed on MasterChef Junior, written a cookbook, and spends his summers teaching kids in his community how to cook.
July is Disability Pride Month, a month that carries real weight for Miles. In his experience, having a disability can be isolating, like the world wasn’t designed with those with disabilities in mind. He’ll tell you that representation is how you push back against that — by showing up and doing the thing anyway.
“I wanted to show that just because someone has a disability and the way they do things looks different than you, doesn’t mean they can’t do amazing things,” says Miles.
In the kitchen, that philosophy is lived out daily. Miles navigates a world of tools largely designed for two hands — stabilizing an icing bag with his arm, finding a different grip, or discovering new techniques. When he first learned to cook, he used an adaptive cutting board that held ingredients in place while he worked. You can see it in the first episode of MasterChef Junior season 9. He doesn’t need it anymore, but he wants other young cooks with limb differences to know it exists.
“I have yet to find something I can’t find a way to make,” he says. “It just might be a creative way to do it.”
Miles’s love of cooking has deep roots. When his family relocated from Dallas to College Station, the restaurant options weren’t quite what they were used to, so they started cooking at home together. Holidays became an occasion to gather with extended family and make the recipes that reminded them of each other. The kitchen became a place where Miles built formative memories of food and family.
In the summer of 2021, his family made their annual trip back to Dallas to visit his grandparents. He signed up for his first cooking camp at Sur La Table and it changed the way Miles looked at food.
“It was during that week that I really found my love for cooking,” he says.
He’s returned to that same Sur La Table every summer since, bringing his brother, his cousins, and a tradition that’s become one of his favorite parts of the year.
Not long after that first summer camp, Miles set his sights on MasterChef Junior. He auditioned once and made it to the final round of casting. Even though he didn’t quite make it on that season, he kept honing his cooking skills and tried again. The second time, he was one of 25 kids flown to Los Angeles from a pool of 14,000 applicants. Twelve made the show and Miles was one of them.
He made it to the top 8, and he made a group of friends in the process. He still talks to his castmates regularly, and they still get together and cook.
“Cooking and eating with friends and family is so important to me,” he says. “It creates some real community.”
The experience also gave him a taste of what a professional kitchen actually demands — the pressure, the teamwork, the professionalism. The experience has inspired Miles to dive deeper into his passion for cooking and connecting with others. Since there’s no Sur La Table nearby, he’s created his own cooking classes inspired by everything he’s learned during his summers in Dallas. Every summer, he leads cooking classes for kids in his community.
His signature dish is ratatouille. He first made the dish at nine years old, brought it to his first MasterChef Junior audition, and perfected the recipe over the years since. It was the first recipe that felt truly his.
His advice for young cooks just getting started: be creative, have fun, and don’t be afraid to make a mess. And for young people with limb differences or any physical difference who wonder whether the thing they love is really possible for them, he doesn’t hesitate.
“Nothing can stop you. There is nothing anyone can say that should stop you from doing what you want to do.”
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