ok heres the weekend update. Saturday was a good learning day. The weather was mild and windy
I loaded the tandoor with 2 x 2Kg bags of self lighting charcoal, opened up the bottom vent, lit them and put my "lid" on top of the tandoor. Checked on it about an hour later and decided that I would cook some more chicken tikka.
The tandoor temperature didnt feel that hot (scientifically measured by putting
my hand inside) and so I put a skewer of chicken inside. I kept it cooking for about 18 minutes before removing it.
Unfortunately the top 2 pieces of chicken needed some additional cooking. The next skewer I prepared, I put the Smaller pieces of meat on the skewer first
and the larger pieces on last. I know some of you are probably saying that its common sense to do it that way but remember I am learning all about this from
scratch. The second (and third and fourth) skewer was more successful because of this. Cooking time came down to about 12 minutes. Obviously the Tandoor was still heating up but no where near the temp I had it last weekend
Back to the seekh kebabs.I had some CA's Keema mince left from last week and decided to use it purely for experimentation and not for consumption. I had about 1/4 left so I decided to try adding another egg as a binder. The finished mix appeared to be too sticky but thought I would give it a go anyway. The outcome was as expected...disaster but I had to go through the motions just to put my mind at rest.
Anyhow I binned the remaining Keema and decided to start again from scratch.
After the kebab experiment I had run out of time for the day and after checking the weather forecast I thought that sunday would probably be a non starter
Got up sunday morning and the weather didnt seem too bad so I thought I would scrape out the ashes and have another go. I noticed quite a lot of cinders in
the ashes and then I realised that for some reason not all the charcoal had burnt. Why? The only conclusion was that I had used too much charcoal from the start. By the end of the day the height of the ash in the bottom of the tandoor was above the level of the vent and therefore restricted the ventilation and restricted the heat!!
Hmmm...Theres a lot more to this than I thought
Learning from my mistakes I re-lit the tandoor with only 1 bag of charcoal and left it to warm up for about 1 hour. Decided to give it another bag of charcoal and another hour and returned later to give it a try.I then went in the kitchen to prepare the keema / seekh mix.This time I bunged all the ingredients into the wifes kenwood mixer and let it do its job. I actually reduced the gram flour by about 1/3 (2 tbsp instead of 3) Dont know why I did this...but I did lol .I left it mixing for about 2 minutes and the resulting mince looked a tad runny. I decided to give it a try anyway Loaded the skewer and pressed the meat onto it with my hand using some cold water as a lubricant (thanks Razor).
Success. ;D ;D ;D
I then went on to cook 15 more kebabs and only had two meet a firey demise!!
Next on the list were the naans. I took UB's advice and tried Taz's naan mix (Thanks UB). Unfortunately I added too much oil and the dough lost all its elasticity so I binned that and tried again but also reduced the oil by 1/3 to 2 tbsp. Again I used the wifes kenwood to mix that. The resulting dough was a little sticky but very elastic. I rolled the naans out as thin as I could, and before loading onto the cushion, I rolled them over a couple of cloves of coarsly chopped garlic & corriander. Cooking time was about 3 minutes, but that gave them a nice crisp outer and a bread-like core (see photos).
The finished naans were without doubt some of the nicest I have ever eaten
The weather slowly got worse during the day turning to drizzle but I dont think it affected the tandoor temperature too much.
I finished cooking at about 5pm
Haldis post was enlightening with regard temperature. The obvious disadvantage of a charcoal powered tandoor is that its harder and takes far longer to control the temperature
The advantage being that the food tastes better when cooked with charcoal
Things learnt so far
I feel a bit stupid writing all this stuff I know this is all common sense... but its good therapy for me lol
Cooking with a Tandoor is really identical in almost every way to conventinal bbq cooking.
Temperature is the most important
You can get a tandoor too hot
The type of fuel is crucial
Too hot and the food is burnt on the outside and uncooked inside
Too cold (in the case of naans) and the naans dont stick to the walls or they are too leathery in texture because of the prolonged cooking time
Typically the naans stick well to start with, but as soon as they start to blister, they detach themselves
Last week I got the temperature up much higher.I Wouldnt be suprised if it was twice as hot judging by the cooking times (45sec - 1 min for a naan last week: 3 minutes this week) The reason was that I used the last few charcoal "brickettes" purchased from Homebase which are far superior imo to normal "lumpwood" charcoal. Thanks UB for the info on the Restaurant Charcoal
A pair of leather gardening gloves/ gauntlets are essential - unless you are some kind of masochist
Use a food mixer to blend keema mince
I will post some photos a bit later
Regards
Mick
