Tandoor Oven

A Tandoor oven is used for cooking certain types of Irani, Indian and Pakistani food, and is widely used method of cooking barbecue. A tandoori oven is essentially a very large clay pot, often standing shoulder-high above the kitchen floor. The tandoori oven is designed to provide very high, dry heat. Fuel for this fire is provided by charcoals lining the bottom of the structure. In order to produce temperatures approaching 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), employees maintain a long vigil to keep the tandoori oven's coals burning all the time. At such high temperatures, most foods cooked in a tandoori oven develop a very crisp outer layer without sacrificing moistness on the inside.

The oven itself is either built in sections; wherein cylinders of a certain width and height are put together in layers and then gelled into each other to get the whole oven, or a coil is used to make the whole cylinder in one go. Either ways, it takes a lot of smoothing and then internal curing to make sure that it doesn’t crack on drying, and also that no breads or meats stick to its internal surface while cooking. Meats like chicken, fish, beef and lamb do very well in tandoori ovens.