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.

“At home, I had hardly ever entered the kitchen. Now that I was living on my own and working, I just didn’t know how and what to cook,” he says. The Internet was no help either. “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,” 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.

“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,” explains Mathur. The site has countered this in two ways: by providing videos for recipes and by creating communities of foodies on the site.

“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,” he adds.

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