TORSTAR TANDOOR

My tandoor wasn’t built in a day.  First came the lust.  Twelve years ago, when I was cooking at  Andre’s on Parliament Street, a group of kitchen gypsies would meet a couple of times a month at the Sher-E-Punjab (351 Danforth Ave) to delight in fabulous food not prepared by any of us.  The owner, Amar Singh, recognized us as part of the international fellowship that are cooks, and invited us to tour his kitchen.  He let me slap a soft ball of uncooked naan dough on the side of the blistering hot clay tandoor and I felt an immediate connection.  From that moment, the desire for a tandoor of my own has lain quietly in the recesses of my cook’s heart.

A tandoor is a rounded clay oven with an opening at the bottom to build up a charcoal or wood fire and a hole at the top where breads and meats are placed inside.  The most irristable of tandoori foods, naan bread, is made of soft dough that is pressed onto the side of the oven and quickly cooked.  Tandoori chicken is one of the best known tandoor cooked foods; made of marinated chicken, cut into pieces and roasted in the oven.  But this is only the tip of the iceberg, other foods that can be prepared using this unique, intense type of heat, are paratha’s, lamb,    And

Having a tandoor at my Muskoka home became finally possible a few months ago, during a chat around the fire with potter Trevor Thomas. One of the greatest pleasures of life in the near north is the amount of time spent with friends around a bon fire under a star-filled sky.  It’s a four- season treat.  One of the greatest frustrations is the lack of Indian food available.  Really there’s nothing.  Work and passion bring me back to Toronto regularly and I  never miss a trip to one  my many  Indian stand-by’s, but  once a month just doesn’t cut it.  I want my curry and naan, my butter chicken and tandoori barbecued meats a couple of times a week at minimum.  I’ll grudgingly admit to keeping a pantry stocked with conveniece Indian foods; premade naan, butter chicken sauces, pappadums and chutneys available even in Huntsville in these days of enlightenment.   However, processed and packaged foods can never rival the real thing.  I yearn for spices freshly roasted and ground, then used to prepare chicken, lamb and bread to be devoured hot from the tandoor.  In Trevor I have found a kindred spirit.  And one with the energy and talent to make it happen.

 
Trevor may be throwing pots in Muskoka now, with Eric Lindgren at his studio just outside Huntsville, but the world and its various cuisines have stoked his imagination since his childhood in England.  Three years ago he came here from his chic and successful studio in London, where he fashioned work like the gorgeous bowl that graces the cover of Dehlia Smith’s “Dehlia’s How To Cook Book Three”.  But, all this is insanely tame compared to the 11 years he spent touring the world on a succession of motorcycles.  His wanderlust has taken him on road trips from England through Europe and Asia, to Australia and New York, through Central and  South America that were several years in duration. It was the year he spent in  India and Nepal that cemented his love for the regional cuisines of India.  Of course, as a Brit he was raised on curry.

In India, Trevor was enthralled by the variety of tandoors he saw in the outdoor kitchens that one sees everywhere.  Tandoors take pride of place in rustic open air cooking spaces made of natural supplies found nearby; a large open sided wooden structure would consist of tree poles and a palm frond leaf roof.  As a traveller, Trevor stopped at roadside stands to have his daily chai, a pot of which was keep constantly brewing on an open fire situated beside the tandoor to benefit from its ambient heat.  At these stands and in local restaurants, naan bread is used to scoop the tandoori barbecued meats. This is not food easily forgotten or done without, which fortunately fuelled Trevor’s enthusiasm for our tandoor project. 

We decided, that night, to make the tandoor dream a reality.  Trevor went home to develop a design based on the tandoors he had seen in India and thorughout the mideast and I hit the internet.  There are a few sights devoted to the backyard tandoor that are worth looking at for step-by-step directions using supplies bought at your local hardware store.  The easiest of these, seems to be one made using an upside down pot for the clay oven, placed in a large oil drum and insulated.  A great idea if you don’t have a talented potter on your team to fashion one by hand.  Our design, however, embraced the ancient model of the tandoor. 

Since antiquity, clay ovens have been made using the coil method of pottery.  Thick ropes of clay are gradually layered, each layer being smoothed into the previous one before the addition of the next.  In this manner, by gradually sloping the oven in, we managed to shape our tandoor.  It looked and felt ancient, and in fact it was.  There was little difference between our method and that of the earliest clay oven builders.  We did build it on a foundation of cinderblocks and fire bricks, which may have been cheating, but will help my functional clay sculpture last through Muskoka winters. We also ran steel posts through the clay at two heights, one to hold  the charcoal (our heat source) and the other to hold the foods we intend to give the tandoori treatment.  

We left it to dry for a week, then wrapped it in a large aluminum sheet and filled the space between the sheet and the oven with vermiculite to act as an insulator.  It was a pity to have to cover up such a lovely thing, but the insulation will allow for greater heat and will help save the oven through inclement weather. Then we happily took her out for a spin to see if she’d fly.  That is, we started up the charcoal and began to heat the oven.

Here, we came to our first and only real glitch.  Since the naan bread was proofed and ready to bake and the chicken and lamb had marinated overnight, our enthusiasm outweighed our better judgement.  In the next couple of hours the oven reached temperatures close to 400F - ouch that’s hot!  It was too much too fast and the centre of the oven was still a little moist.  So, when the inner surface baked solid, the pressure of the steam building up in the centre of the clay caused it to explode outward.  The upshot is that we had some serious chunks of clay burst off on the low inner side of the oven.  Fortunately, the surface needed for the naan was not effected and the oven still maintained its incredible heat.  If you plan to attempt a clay oven, Trevor suggests you heat it slowly over eight hours to avoid the build up of steam that cracked ours.  Since it still works, Trevor expects he can patch it with clay and if that doesn’t work, a cement patch is sure to stand.

Despite Trevor’s near tears, we pushed on and brought out the food.  Naan bread should be pressed onto the hot inner sides of the tandoor with a small heat resistant pillow, but we used an oven mitt.  We brushed the dough on one side with a little milk and pressed it onto the side of the pot.  Within minutes it began to turn golden and when finished had an authentic blistered appearance and a hot steamy texture. There is such a thing as a hook that is used to remove the dough, but we scraped it from the sides of the tandoor with a curved piece of left over aluminum.  I had prepared lentils earlier, so we ate that first batch around the oven, tearing off pieces and scooping up the lentils.

I started another batch of dough, and we put the marinated meats on the grill.  For marinade, I pan roasted some cardamom seeds, chilies, ginger and garlic and made it all into a paste with garam masala, turmeric and paprika.  This was mixed with yoghurt that I had let drain through cheesecloth to remove the whey. Usually the tandoor is kept very hot for breads, then meats are  cooked at the end of the day, utilizing the less intense dying heat.  If using the oven when it is very hot, its best to cut the meat into 2" chunks, then thread  on a skewer.  Only use tender cuts of meat, because this type of fast cooking will do nothing to tenderize.  Our results baking meats in  cooled oven were terrific.  The marinated meats were tender, succulent and nicely spiced.

I have plans for my tandoor. To keep it safe; to make it pretty.  This 300 pound oven cannot be moved about so it will be covered with at least 10 feet of snow every winter.  To help it withstand this insult, I plan to build a solid structure around it.  Since it lives in Muskoka, that structure will be made of Muskoka stone. The most exciting plans, however, involve the food I will make.  The naan recipes I have tried are good, but not Sher-E-Punjab good and that’s the bread fit for breaking.  So, I will wheedle every good Tandoori recipe I can from friends and restauranteurs alike,  and play with them until satisfied.  It could take years.  Sweet.