We have a lot of menu items that are cooked in a tandoor oven, but, very few Australians
actually know about tandoori cooking. We’d like to pull back the veil on your favorite Indian restaurant food. If you know you love the distinctive taste of tandoori meats, but you don’t know why, read on! Tandoori is the adjectival form of the word tandoor, which is what we call the vertical clay ovens we used to cook everything from meat to bread. Tandoors aren’t just found in India—many cultures across the Middle East, Asia, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe use tandoors for cooking,though the most common style is usually associate with the Punjabi region in the northern area of India and Pakistan. It used to be very common for a small village or settlement to share a communal tandoor, and there are still places in rural Punjab today where the community shares tandoor. So what is a tandoor? It’s a vertical clay pot that can remain hot for long periods of time, reach on high
temperatures, and cook food inside using radiant heat, convection heat, and smoking, a triple effective the method that cooks materials fast while retaining moisture and requiring very little grease or oil.Unlike Western horizontal ovens, where you open a vertical door and slide in what is to be cooked, meat is usually lowered on skewers into the tandoor (allowing it to cook evenly on all sides) and bread is baked directly on the side of the tandoor. You’d think the naan or roti would fall off, but the walls themselves are usually marinated with ghee or spices and bread will stick to the sides of the oven as it bakes!