For the love of food, you have to check out India's first miniature cooking channel

As children, most of us played with miniature kitchen sets in which we cooked make-believe food. Imagine a miniature kitchen that turns out 'real' food – delicious – and very authentic-looking chicken burgers, paani puris, Hyderabadi dum biryani, and so on. That's 'The Tiny Foods', India's first miniature cooking channel on YouTube.

Tiny Foods was started in November last year by a couple from a small village called Thanipadi around 30km from Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu. Ram Kumar works in his father's gold loans business and Valarmathi is a government employee.

"My wife is a very good cook and I wanted to put up her cooking videos on YouTube. But while researching on the Internet, we came across miniature cooking channels, and decided to start one," says Kumar. The couple decided to focus on Indian, especially South Indian, cuisine as there were none in that space. They also decided to have an outdoor setting, a bucolic village scene, for their videos – another unique factor.

So Kumar built a small hut with cardboard and hay sticks, applying a coat of wet sand to give it the look of a typical rural Indian mud house. Valarmathi and Kumar also sourced or built other props for the backdrop – a tiny cow, hen, some goat, a cart, a water pump, a well, etc. All the food on Tiny Foods is cooked on clay pots, the largest of which is 5cm in diametre. "We found them at a shop in Tiruvannamalai," says Kumar.

But by far the biggest challenge was to have a steady flame by which to cook. Twigs and camphor, which they tried at first, didn't work, and neither did candles – they just wouldn't last long enough to cook in. "Then Valarmathi came up with a way – a candle with a thick string inside," Kumar explains. The candle is placed in a pot shaped like a traditional choolha, and covered with straws to give it a realistic look. The effect is remarkably authentic – despite the cheesy visual effects – and Valarmathi can do quite complicated recipes involving frying, grinding, boils, steaming, etc.

Kumar and Valarmathi upload a video every Saturday, having worked on it over the previous weekend. Most of the 40-odd videos they've posted until now are Indian dishes, all kinds of snacks, entrees, meals from across the country. But, of and on, they also do stuff like burgers, pizzas, noodles, puff pastry, fried fish and milkshakes. "Our viewers send us recommendations of what they want to see and we cook these," says Kumar.

With 1,86,000 subscribers and some videos garnering views many times that, Tiny Foods has a dedicated and active set of viewers who send suggestions and tips to improve the show. "It was one of our viewers, who suggested that we should use quail eggs [much smaller than hen's eggs] for our recipes," says Kumar. For all this popularity, however, Kumar was able to monetise the channel just a few months ago.

The popularity has had its downsides too – "In the past few months, there has been a huge rush of channels doing Indian cooking in miniature format. We seem to have set off a trend," laughs Kumar.

Across The Globe

Cooking real food in miniature and posting videos of it started in Japan. Miniature Space, the best known of these, began in November 2014 and has 2.7 million subscribers. Unlike Tiny Foods, this channel uses pretty sophisticated implements – a very real looking cooking range and oven, with cast iron pots and pans. It even sells these, though at $189, it isn't exactly cheap. Others have come up all across – Jenny's Mini Cooking Show from the UK, Miniature Cusina from the Phillipines, Tiny Kitchen in the US, and so on. In Turkey, there's Mini Turk Mutfagi which serves up Turkish dishes like the lahmacun, and pide, kebabs such as the Iskender, and so on. It's been picked up by the country's tourism department as a novel way to showcase the country's cuisine, and videos are played across the underground metro. Among the Indian ones, check out Mini Foodkey, Miniature Cooking Show, and Miniature Food Farm, among others.