Food Content That Speaks – Tavakkul – YouTube Channels For Foodies

A large percentage of food-focused YouTube creators have a format that, in one way or another, involves two main themes:

1. National or international travel to talk about other people’s cooking.
2. Cooking to camera whilst describing the ingredients, cooking techniques and resulting taste.

With the first theme, the best food always requires some travel, it’s beyond rare that the best restaurants are within walking distance. When traveling for the best food, even if the creator is a chef themselves, they will generally not be cooking but rather reviewing the food of others. The creator will often link the food they are eating with the culture of the geographical location of said food. Sometimes, they also deep dive into the person behind the food they are enjoying. Outstandingly good food is almost always the result of years of persistence from an outstandingly passionate individual. The second theme, generally set in the creator’s own kitchen, usually involves being as authentic as possible with the ingredients and methodology whilst cooking well-known dishes. Both themes almost always contain a large amount of narration.

High in the Azerbaijani Caucus mountains, in a village called Qamarvan, there resides a genius content creator and chef who defies all stereotypes. This particular creator doesn’t travel around for his videos, only cooks his own food, and the only speaking or reviewing to be heard in his videos is a solitary word uttered by this master of open-air cooking. He is a proud Lezgin (an amazingly resilient northeast Caucasian ethnic group), the man’s name is, Tavakkul.

>>As you love Tavakkul, I bet you love Street Food too!  Make sure you check out our Street Food YouTube channel here: Street Food Scout <<

As a young kid, having a place where you can go and play football with all your mates, surrounded by majestic mountains, with sheep, goats, tortoises, and puppies to pet when you take a breather is pretty much kid heaven. To also have the most outrageously gorgeous meal ready and waiting for you after you’ve run off all that energy, well that pretty much catapults this scenario to kid wonderland. Tavakkul is the rightly proud purveyor of what Disney Land’s C-suite executives should remodel their outdated idea of fun on, Tavakkul Land.

In Tavakkul Land, there’s no queuing for rollercoasters, no overpriced fast food of dubious origin or healthiness, and no parents pretending to have fun. Nope, Tavakkul Land consists of the man himself, his sheep, goats, dogs, tortoises, bees, a jaw-droppingly beautiful setting, freshly brewed tea on tap, and whatever mouth-watering meal he has decided to prepare, cook and share that day. And all of this is immaculately done to camera, in the open air, with only a single word spoken that’s always accompanied by a ‘thumbs-up’.

His cooking is the type that I’d certainly never witnessed before watching his channel. He will frequently butcher and cook whole animals. The size of the resulting meat to be cooked can often mean he has to actually build a cooking receptacle big enough to do the job. Tavakkul builds as well as he cooks, knocking up clay-lined brick ovens, water-powered spit roasts, giant doner kebab furnaces, you name it and he’s constructed it. Then there’s what he cooks in these amazing cooking machines. The meal of the day is always laid out before us in its raw constituent parts, very often a meat or fish dish with an array of fresh vegetables and baked bread. Tavakkul then works his magic as he chops, peels, seasons, marinates, rubs, and generally performs food alchemy before our eyes. They say it’s never good to go food shopping on an empty stomach, especially if you’re watching the pennies. Well, it isn’t so clever to go shopping post a Tavakkul video either, you’ll end up coming back with enough to feed a small village.

>>As you love Tavakkul, I bet you love Street Food too!  Make sure you check out our Street Food YouTube channel here: Street Food Scout <<

Because of the sheer scale of the setting, the food, and what the food’s cooked in, it’s a bit like ‘fantasy cooking’, as exact re-creation would be hard but definitely not impossible. His awesome recipes and food ideas that he shows us are replicable by you and I, albeit probably on a smaller scale. The ovens, spit roasts, etc that he shows us being built would be awesome projects for the handiest ones amongst us with sizeable gardens.

Tavakkul has taken his channel from 0 to 3.8 million subscribers in under 3 years, this is remarkable channel growth according to any metric. His style has remained beautifully authentic, although he did actually speak a little more in his earlier videos, I guess this was before he came up with the beautiful idea of simply saying one word. His video backdrop, as well as his cooking equipment, have definitely become a little snazzier as subscriber numbers have grown. He now also has gorgeous merchandise which you’ll see him cooking with, but his captivatingly creative outdoor-cooking style remains totally true to his original format.

Apart from being an absolutely nailed-on subscription for your weekly content, this channel has something much deeper going on. Not only does it provide a window into Lezgin food and culture (which I’ve never seen so eloquently displayed before), but it also offers a brilliant insight into happy and healthily fed kids; appreciating our environment; true farm-to-table cooking; trying to make equipment ourselves rather than buying; showing people rather than telling them, and basically being a very lovely human being. If I lived in Qamarvan, I sure know who I’d be voting for mayor.

>>As you love Tavakkul, I bet you love Street Food too!  Make sure you check out our Street Food YouTube channel here: Street Food Scout <<

Tavakkul’s channel is called: Wilderness Cooking

Wilderness Cooking Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/WILDERNESSCOOKING

Brilliant starter video to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ5TOZe3WF8

This video has pretty much everything – from making clever stuff, cooking yummy stuff, beautiful scenery, animals, and of course, happy kids eating his food at the end. Enjoy.

>>As you love Tavakkul, I bet you love Street Food too!  Make sure you check out our Street Food YouTube channel here: Street Food Scout <<