iWorld
Hansal Mehta returns to food TV with AI-powered series ‘Khana Dil Se’
New show explores India’s culinary heritage through artificial intelligence.
MUMBAI: Hansal Mehta just added artificial intelligence to his kitchen because three decades after Khana Khazana made cooking a national obsession, he’s back to stir the pot with a smarter sous-chef. Collective Studios has partnered with True Story Films, founded by filmmaker Hansal Mehta and producer Sahil Saigal, to announce Khana Dil Se – An AI Journey Through India’s Kitchen. The upcoming episodic series uses artificial intelligence not merely as a visual tool but as a collaborator to trace the country’s vast culinary traditions, stories of migration, memory and identity embedded in recipes passed down through generations.
The project marks Mehta’s return to the food genre where he first made his name in the early 1990s with the groundbreaking cookery show Khana Khazana, which turned Chef Sanjeev Kapoor into a household name. Joining him is Indian MasterChef Shamsher Ahmed as subject matter expert and culinary consultant, bringing decades of expertise across regional Indian cuisines to ensure authenticity.
Collective Artists Network, founder and group CEO Vijay Subramaniam said, “India’s culinary traditions are among the richest cultural archives in the world, yet so many of these stories remain undocumented. Khana Dil Se brings together creators, filmmakers, and technologists to surface those stories in a way that hasn’t been attempted before.”
Hansal Mehta remarked, “Food is memory. When you cook something from another culture, you’re not just following a recipe, you’re stepping into a piece of someone else’s life. With Khana Dil Se, we want to use every tool available to us, including AI, to trace those stories before they disappear.”
Producer Sahil Saigal added, “Khana Dil Se gave us a chance to ask what food television could look like if AI were part of the process, not replacing the human story, but helping us reach deeper into it.”
The series is expected to blend immersive storytelling with AI-driven insights to uncover undocumented culinary traditions and follow the journeys of dishes as they have travelled and transformed across communities and centuries.
In a television landscape where recipes often stay surface-level, Hansal Mehta is serving up something far more substantial, a smart, soulful exploration of India through its kitchens, proving once again that the best stories aren’t just cooked, they’re remembered, shared, and now, intelligently rediscovered.
