Make your cake and eat it too

The site that dishes out recipes through videos is being lapped up by Indians worldwide

Twenty-two-year-old Vikrant Mathur was having a difficult time in America. He had completed his MBA and was working for a top-notch software development firm. That was the easy part. The hostile, uncharted territory was the kitchen.

8220;At home, I had hardly ever entered the kitchen. Now that I was living on my own and working, I just didn8217;t know how and what to cook,8221; he says. The Internet was no help either. 8220;There were very few Indian food recipes on the Net, and they only had text, no pictures. We needed people to show us what to cook, how to cook it and what it would look like,8221; he adds.

Seven years on, ifood.tv, a site Mathur co-founded with three others 10 months ago to solve his food problems, has become the most popular cookery site in the Indian Web space.

8220;There have always been cookery shows on TV, but you have to note down everything in a hurry. Often you miss details, sometimes you need to substitute ingredients, but there is no one to help,8221; explains Mathur. The site has countered this in two ways: by providing videos for recipes and by creating communities of foodies on the site.

8220;The entire concept is to provide the videos on demand. You just need to carry your laptop into the kitchen and stop, reset, play the video as and when you want. With this you can cook the food of your choice, step by step,8221; he adds.

On the other hand, the communities are ever present to help. 8220;I have high cholesterol, so if I need to substitute butter and sugar in a recipe, all I have to do is send a mail to the person who put up the recipe, and within minutes he8217;ll tell me how to change the ingredients without losing the original taste,8221; adds Mathur.

In ten months since its inception, the site8217;s four co-creators have only contributed 20 per cent of the content. The rest is from people eager to share their recipes, cooks tasting and rating these recipes, and of course, core food enthusiasts profiling the local flavour of their areas.

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As Ganesh Dutta, 29-year-old research associate and a self-confessed foodie, says, 8220;I just love the rasjoole you get at Jia Sarai, Delhi, during Diwali. So I shot a short clip of the atmosphere and the food and put it up on the site. I finally found a platform where I could share my local experience.8221;

It8217;s not only amateurs who have been flocking to the site; more than 30 chefs are using it to spread their recipes. 8220; I upload recipes, recipe videos 038; blogs from my book, Modern Indian Cooking. I even have a group with more than 500 users and more added every day. The minute I upload the videos recipes, the users interact by asking questions on ingredients and techniques,8221; says Hari Nayak, a chef and an author based in the United States.

For Mathur, the journey is far from over. 8220;We want to make the site easier, more transparent, so that cooking becomes simpler. We also want to get rid of Internet dependency, you should be able to get all the recipes on cell phones and PDAs,8221; he adds. If the 6,000 regular users and 17 million clicks a month are any indication, the foodies are raring to go mobile.