Topic: Home Tandoor Tips

[PhilUK]

easy way of testing if tandoor is hot enough- throw a pice of zinc in-it has a melting point of around 420c, which is about right temp for a tandoor.
phil

[JerryM]

Phil Chaa006 - many thanks for taking time to search out temp. surprisingly high. i think 900F also equates to the highest temp needed for pizza (500-550F does a pretty good job though).

PhilUK, sounds as if i might end up having to get one of those infra red temp things. just the price putting me off.

[Ghoulie]

Well - I christened my home made tandoor yesterday - charcoal fired.  I would give myself 5 out of 10 for the results.  Took a longer time than I expected to get it hot (1 hour & 2 lots of charcoal) - as i thought it would be - and to cook with, and a lot longer to cook than expected too (40 minutes).  My thoughts :-

1. Not hot enough - hence the length of time - just ordered a probe to check for next time
2. Over loaded the amount I tried in one go - 6 chops, & 2x half chickens split as half chicken on each skewer as 2 parts per half chicken.  Compared to BIR servings, the chicken pieces were a lot larger than you would get as a tandoori half chicken meal. Your comments on overloading / chicken piece size welcome guys
3. Tried a naan at the end - blistered up ok after a minute - but stuck like the proverbial to the clay pot side.  Clearly not hot enough at this point for naan - charcoal in base almost done.

Now having tried it and reading this thread :-
a). I will now measure the temp and use more charcoal and have another set of coals on the go as a top up. Having seen the comment about BIRs using a combination of gas & charcoal within the same tandoor, I may go down this route if I can't get decent results using charcoal alone.
b). Note the need to cure the clay walls with salt / water to prevent naan sticking oil in the dough mix may also help - none in my recipe.

I also suffered from wet marinade areas still present because of the way the chicken pieces & chops slid down the skewer sticking together preventing the charring of the overall meat surface.  My thoughts here are to put  some kind of metal spacer or veg? between each meat piece to ensure they are kept separate to stop the sliding together - maybe use smaller pieces of meat as opposed to quarter chicken pieces that are on the larger side compared to BIR chicken size servings.

Fire away guys at my mistakes so I can bring 'er indoors back onside to the 'delights' of tandoor cooking.