The recipe to gain a million YouTube subscribers

Ahead of Poila Baisakh, team Bong Eats discusses how they document recipes and the future of the cuisine

- Rituparna Roy

A video for postor bora or poppy seed fritters on the YouTube channel Bong Eats has around four lakh views, and more than 1,200 comments. It shows co-founders Insiya Poonawala and Saptarshi Chakraborty working on trials, trying to pin down the perfect recipe. Since Chakraborty did not grow up eating postor bora, he requested his viewers to share their family recipes. They received over 400 emails from Bengalis settled in Murshidabad, Dhaka, Birmingham and beyond with several variations of the recipe. The video captures the making of the traditional Bengali speciality, interspersed with step-by-step instructions and nifty hacks contributed by viewers in Chakraborty's lucid voice-over.

It is this honest storytelling, aided by snappy production aesthetics, which makes Bong Eats such an enjoyable viewing experience. The YouTube channel has over 1.51 million subscribers, and showcases Bengali recipes, street foods and dishes of the various communities that have made Kolkata their own.

Chakraborty, 36 and Poonawala, 37, started Bong Eats in 2016 to initiate a conversation around Bengali food, and to inspire younger generations to cook it irrespective of their backgrounds or where they were settled. They cook, shoot, and edit the recipes in their home. While Poonawala does the actual cooking, Chakraborty handles the camera.