Tandoori cooking explained: inside the clay oven

Few things smell as good as food coming out of a tandoor. The clay oven gives tandoori chicken its charred edges, tikka its smoky flavour and naan its blistered, puffy crust.

What is a tandoor?

A tandoor is a deep clay oven, shaped like a bell or a barrel, heated from below by charcoal, wood or gas. The clay walls soak up and radiate the heat, so the inside gets far hotter than a domestic oven. Food cooks quickly from every side at once: the outside chars while the inside stays moist.

That combination of radiant heat from the walls, direct heat from the coals and hot air rising through the oven is hard to copy at home. A very hot grill or barbecue gets close, but the deep, even char of tandoori chicken and the blistered crust of a good naan really come from the clay oven.

Clay ovens like this have been used across Central and South Asia for a very long time. Tandoori chicken as we know it is often credited to Moti Mahal, a restaurant founded in Delhi after the partition of India in 1947, and from there it spread around the world.

The marinade

Most tandoori dishes start with a marinade of yoghurt, ginger, garlic and spices. The yoghurt tenderises the meat and helps the spices cling, then caramelises in the heat. Meat, fish or paneer is threaded onto long skewers and lowered into the oven, and the drips of marinade sizzle on the coals, adding a little smoke.

Tikka, shashlick and seekh kebab

• Tikka means pieces: boneless chunks of marinated chicken or lamb.
• Shashlick adds peppers, onions and tomatoes to the skewer, a style that recalls the grilled skewers of Central Asia.
• Seekh kebab is spiced minced lamb moulded around a skewer (seekh).

Naan from the tandoor

Naan is slapped onto the hot inner wall of the oven, where it bubbles and blisters in a minute or two. That is what gives it the soft, chewy middle and the charred spots on top. Tandoori roti is the thinner, plainer bread baked the same way. Stuffed naans, such as keema (minced lamb), cheese or garlic and cheese, are sealed around their filling before baking, while peshwari naan is filled with almond, raisin and coconut for a sweeter bread that suits a hot curry.

Tandoori dishes at Namaste Gurkha

Our tandoori dishes are dry, meaning they come without sauce: chicken or lamb tikka, chicken or lamb shashlick, paneer shashlick, tandoori king prawns, half a tandoori chicken and the Gurkha Mix Platter, which brings together tandoori chicken, king prawns, seekh kebab, chicken tikka and lamb tikka. Pair them with a curry, a dal or a vegetable side, plus naan from the same oven. See them all on our menu, and try Nepal’s own grilled dishes in our guide to sekuwa and choila.