Food for thought

Dressed in white kurta and pyjamas and whipping up delicious recipes on YouTube, Nawab’s Kitchen Food for All Orphans is not your usual cookery channel but a platform which uses food to support a social cause. Spearheaded by three friends from Hyderabad — Khwaja Moinuddin, Srinath Reddy and Bhagat Reddy, the YouTube channel has fed thousands of orphans till date.

Using YouTube as a means to feed thousands of orphans across the city, Hyderabadi trio — Khwaja Moinuddin, Srinath Reddy and Bhagat Reddy — are on a mission to spread smiles.

With more than 250 videos-from the iconic Nizami biryani to a non-oven recipe of black forest cake; from chocolate dosa to hot dogs — the channel has recently garnered over 1.1 million subscribers from across the world.

Talking about how their culinary journey started, 39-year-old Khwaja Moinuddin says, “I always had a passion to serve the society but it wasn’t till a few months back that I got a concrete idea on how to go about it. I was working with a Telugu news channel where I met Srinath and Bhagat, who shared the same passion. In the end, we zeroed in on this idea,” adding, “After the initial discussion and planning, the first video took almost a year and a half to see the light due to a financial crunch.”

However, after getting funds in place for at least 10 videos, Khwaja began his tryst with making videos and feeding the kids at different orphanages. “The first video where we made chicken biryani costed us Rs 8,000-9,000, but after we fed the kids, the smiles and the happiness which we saw gave us the boost that we needed to go ahead,” he shares.

While the food being cooked is delicious, the cause that it caters to has made the channel very popular. And while the team posts three videos every week on an average, the Warangal native has had his share of challenges too.

Elaborating on the same, he says, “Getting sponsors for these videos is a challenge as is shooting for them. As we cook on a large scale, the cooking time ranges from two-three hours and an entire day goes to complete one video. An ideal day of shooting starts around 10 am and ends at 9.30 pm. We start by buying fresh ingredients and then travel to the shoot location, which is 6 km from Manikonda, with all the cooking vessels. Once there, we gather the wood and light the fire to cook — that involves a lot of technique as well. Luckily, the location where we shoot has been given to us for free by the sarpanch as a support to our cause.” Interestingly, when they first started out, it was only Khwaja, Srinath and Bhagat who did all the work, but now they have help from three more volunteers. As to what lies ahead for the passionate trio, Khwaja says, “We want to expand to all the districts and help spread a smile among as many orphan kids as possible. But that will take some time as we need lots of financial support and tie ups.”