There is certain fervour in Yaman Gupta’s manner as he talks about his cooking with a zeal and assurance that belie his age. 16-year-old Yaman is one of India’s most popular YouTube chefs and he is addressing the audience for YouTube’s Top Chef India at the New Delhi’s Oberoi Hotel. With cooking videos being one of the top five videos watched in the country, video chefs have gained immense popularity, with their channels having a large number of subscribers.
The ease of creating and broadcasting videos has allowed for a very large cross section of the Indian populace to create and share their own cooking videos. This diversity is evident from the five top online chefs who were a part of the programme. Alongside Yaman, who’s a student, there were Nisha Madhulika and Gayatri Sharma, both homemakers, former restaurateur Sanjay Thumma and professional chef Harpal Singh.
Most of these chefs had no idea that their YouTube videos would garner such interest. They started making videos as an outlet for their creative passions and continued making and posting them due to the encouraging response that the videos met. Homemaker Nisha Madhulika remembers how she started making these videos as she had a lot of spare time following leaving a job. Young Yaman started making the videos in the time which he had free on schooldays. With a consistent increase in their subscriber base over time, the videos started getting more accolades and recognition. The growing popularity of the videos meant that the chefs devoted more time to the creation of new content for their channels.
These videos are also an outlet for the professional chefs to engage their creativity. Talking about his time as a restaurateur, Sanjay Thumma decried the constraints that the business put on his cooking. With the commitments required to run the business encroaching most of his time, he realised that he was no longer being able to devote sufficient time to his real passion, cooking. The videos allowed him to rediscover the joy of cooking and also gave him the creative freedom that he craved.
But these chefs need to do more that just create food videos. With the proliferation of videos which give out recipes, there is some need for the chefs to remain engaging. While the simplicity of the videos by Gayatri Sharma and Nisha Mahulika work in their favour, there is a need for the chefs to be engaging. Acknowledging this, Chef Harpal underlines the need for the chefs to be entertaining in the videos to keep the audience in thrall. All said and done this burgeoning of the online food resource has given the people access to a very large and rapidly growing resource to help refine their cooking, and experiment with the food that they eat.
