The Tandoor Site

Cooking: Description

I thought you might like to know what it's like to cook with the tandoor so here's a description of the last cooking session. I may update this to reflect my developing skills as a tandoor chef when I start cooking again when the weather gets better.

A little while ago my parents were staying with us so I decided to show off our new toy. I decided to cook Shish kebabs (minced lamb) and to make my first attempt at naan bread.

I lit the tandoor and mixed up the lamb, bread and spices to make the kebabs. I had made some naan dough (from a Madhur Jaffrey book) earlier in the day. Once the tandoor was nicely up to heat (about an hour and a half) I started to form the kebabs by squeezing the lamb mixture around the skewers.

These skewers were supplied with the tandoor and are a wonder in themselves. They are a full four feet long in three different thicknesses, from quite thin up to thick enough to tandoori a whole cow. It quickly became apparent that there was no way that the meat was going to stick to the skewers while they stood vertically in the tandoor so I had to hurriedly switch to plan B - cooking the kebabs on the Weber.

Fortunately the Weber heats very quickly and in just half an hour I had the shish kebabs (on rather more conventionally sized skewers) cooking away. Then it was time to cook the naans.

Indian breads are cooked in the tandoor by being stuck to the inside walls. I had previously tried this with tandoori roti, which are effectively large, oven-cooked chapatis. I wasn't terribly successful as more than half of the breads refused to stick to the walls and ended up in the charcoal below. Plus I picked up some interesting burns on my arms in the process.

You've got to imagine the scene. There's a clay pot with a vigorous charcoal fire in the bottom. It's been burning for an hour or so and the whole thing is intensely hot - I don't know how hot because my oven thermometer only goes up to 300C (570F) and it was off the scale. The cook has to pick up a bread and deftly (not!) plunge their hand into the inferno and deposit the bread on the red hot wall. It's not for the faint hearted!

So I was half expecting the naan to be a disaster which might not provide food for the waiting guests but would certainly provide entertainment as the cooking idiot jumped around swearing as naan dough ended up in the embers and his burns got worse.

So it was a bit of an anticlimax when the naans stuck securely to the inside of the tandoor and cooked perfectly. When they were puffed up and brown I removed them with the special implements designed for the purpose (sharp hook and spatula to grab and prise respectively) and wrapped them in a tea towel while waiting to serve. I suspect that the softer dough of the naans, as compared to the tandoori roti, makes them an easier job to cook in the tandoor. Perhaps it was just a lucky fluke - I will know when I try naans again.

I served the starter to an appreciative audience - great naan bread with shish kebabs and some mint and yoghurt.