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What better way to celebrate the 4th than to experiment with improvised tandoori cooking? Because that's what we did today. We mostly followed Alton Brown's method, and it worked pretty well. We didn't get as much cooked as we would have liked, but what we did cook was delicious. Definitely will have to try it again!
The basic idea is, take a flower pot and cut the bottom off. This is pretty easy (if dramatically messy) with an angle grinder and diamond masonry saw. Which I just happened to have on hand.
Next you bring it up to temperature. They're called ovens, but personally I would rather think of it as a furnace, because that's what it is. You're dealing with almost metallurgical temperatures, in a device that could be a bloomery with minor changes. (Well, a real one could. This one was just a toy.)
Unfortunately my IR thermometer maxes out at 500F. This was very early on in the process, we should have been hitting 800-900 later on.
So, given these temperatures and the fragility of the pot, cracks are likely. AB's directions call for the pot to be soaked in water overnight, but that just doesn't make any sense to me. Water causes cracks at high temp! So I skipped it.
Which may have been a mistake, as it cracked clean in half, but one can't really draw any conclusions from a single test.
The meat goes on skewers, which just stick down into the fire. The lower parts cook faster and get singed, but the yogurt sauce kind of protects the meat and you end up with a delicious charred taste.
The lamb above worked great, but the chicken had much less friction against the skewers and tended to slide down. So I cooked these upside down, so the big curly handle would prevent them from falling off entirely. This made manipulation a bit harder, but luckily I had my old casting gloves sitting around for just this kind of thing.
In the end, the cracking wasn't a problem, the amount of fuel was. I stopped adding charges once it cracked, fearful that we needed to get what cooking done that we could before it completely collapsed. Also, it was threatening to rain, which certainly would have cracked it. As things turned out, it didn't rain and the pot was very stable even cracked entirely in half, but the coals ran out about 2/3 of the way through the process. The rest we finished in the kitchen oven. Oh well.
This was just one part of the operation, the sauce was the really tasty part. And chai! We also had some naan, but due to the cracking/fuel problems we never got around to making it in the traditional fashion. But we will next time, I promise you.
The basic idea is, take a flower pot and cut the bottom off. This is pretty easy (if dramatically messy) with an angle grinder and diamond masonry saw. Which I just happened to have on hand.
Next you bring it up to temperature. They're called ovens, but personally I would rather think of it as a furnace, because that's what it is. You're dealing with almost metallurgical temperatures, in a device that could be a bloomery with minor changes. (Well, a real one could. This one was just a toy.)
Unfortunately my IR thermometer maxes out at 500F. This was very early on in the process, we should have been hitting 800-900 later on.
So, given these temperatures and the fragility of the pot, cracks are likely. AB's directions call for the pot to be soaked in water overnight, but that just doesn't make any sense to me. Water causes cracks at high temp! So I skipped it.
Which may have been a mistake, as it cracked clean in half, but one can't really draw any conclusions from a single test.
The meat goes on skewers, which just stick down into the fire. The lower parts cook faster and get singed, but the yogurt sauce kind of protects the meat and you end up with a delicious charred taste.
The lamb above worked great, but the chicken had much less friction against the skewers and tended to slide down. So I cooked these upside down, so the big curly handle would prevent them from falling off entirely. This made manipulation a bit harder, but luckily I had my old casting gloves sitting around for just this kind of thing.
In the end, the cracking wasn't a problem, the amount of fuel was. I stopped adding charges once it cracked, fearful that we needed to get what cooking done that we could before it completely collapsed. Also, it was threatening to rain, which certainly would have cracked it. As things turned out, it didn't rain and the pot was very stable even cracked entirely in half, but the coals ran out about 2/3 of the way through the process. The rest we finished in the kitchen oven. Oh well.
This was just one part of the operation, the sauce was the really tasty part. And chai! We also had some naan, but due to the cracking/fuel problems we never got around to making it in the traditional fashion. But we will next time, I promise you.
no subject
When I was in college a friend of mine made us a forge: Large galvanized steel bucket, a length of gas flue with holes drilled in it, hole in the side of the bucket, gas flue in the hole with part we'd drilled holes in on the inside, pop-rivet into place. Fill bottom with sand to keep from scorching whatever you're setting the forge on (bare earth, in our case), but don't cover your holes, and build a fire. Now stick a yard blower on low up the other end of the pipe. We could get it welding-hot if we were patient... :)
*thinks* Alton doesn't generally do things haphazardly. Maybe there's a sneaky trick to the rationale behind the soaking thing. Further research indicated!
Would love to hear about the sauce, and the making of naan.
no subject
The water has a lot of thermal mass, slowing the temperature increase of the pot. Meanwhile, the pot is entirely porous, so rather than building up pressure, the water evaporates off as steam. The result is a slower heating rate in the open-pore/unsealed ceramic, and lower likelihood of cracking.
Also, possibly, a more moist cooking environment.
Just use a standard porous clay pot and not some finished thing. Which you wouldn't want to do anyway.
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Definitely speed of heating is the issue here, though. Next time I try it, I'm going to take extra steps to build the fire inside very slowly. The trouble is that once you add the pot, the chimney it creates start pumping up the heat very, very quickly.
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Too bad about the lack of explosions. Maybe if you scale it up enough you could at least get some catastrophic clay failures.
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Maybe not an explosion, but you scale it up far enough and the bottom of the grill will fail, dropping a mass of very hot coals onto whatever surface you're running it on. Say, a wood deck. Attached to the house. The thought was not far from my mind yesterday, particularly after the plastic handle on the clinker trap started smoking a bit. You wouldn't quite be able to forge this way, without an induced draft of some kind, but it's close.
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Why do you think it's speed of heating, vs. a cold draft hitting from outside?
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(And while I am a huge AB fan, I sometimes find his non-culinary inventions a bit... underdesigned in practice. Possibly because there just isn't enough room in the show for all the details. And there is enough weird mysticism surrounding high temperature systems that I'm automatically a bit suspicious.)
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Of course, at some point, might as well just cast an oven...the ones the Tandoozy folks made seem reasonable.
-B.
no subject
What you did manage to do sounds like tasty fun!