Social media broadening food horizons, says chef

A Coventry-born chef whose TikTok food videos have racked up thousands of views online has said social media videos can be easier to follow than recipe books.

Naveen Jaspal, from What Nav Eats, currently has 102,000 followers and 2.2 million likes on the social media platform.

The chef and foodie has been posting recipes online for about 18 months and has said TikTok and Instagram, and just watching people cook, are helping to broaden people's food horizons.

Ms Jaspal, who now lives near Manchester, said she had always been interested in food and used to linger in the kitchen when her parents were cooking at the family home in Warwickshire.

She said she started cooking and showing her dinners on social media for family and friends, and a few suggested she make her account public.

"I uploaded my leftover roast dinner pie and it racked up 4.5 million views and the rest is history," she said.

"Since then, every evening I go online and I post what I'm having for dinner and then, occasionally, I'll post the recipe if it needs a recipe."

Ms Jaspal told how social media had helped her hold on to her Indian heritage with videos of people making traditional curries.

"These recipes have been passed by generations," she said, and those recipes are being brought back and made more accessible to younger generations.

She said videos could be better than recipe books, adding: "Sometimes you look at recipes and they're daunting because they list multiple ingredients and it's almost like – well I've got to go and do a whole food shop just to get those ingredients in.

"When I'm cooking, I'm trying to find something with few ingredients, or I'll look at some hacks.

"How can we cheat our way out of this to make a quick easy weekday dinner? What other foods are on the market that we can use, and therefore cobble it together in about 20 minutes?

"It's more enjoyable to cook within 20 minutes but also people can visually see how we're putting it together.

"What we don't want is 100 different ingredients and we've got no reason to ever use them again."

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