A Winter in India

At the luncheon at the Dental Meeting we got to see chapatis being made in a tandoor oven. Chapatis are the basic round flat bread served with every meal. A tandoor is a stone-lined oven, the traditional way of cooking many foods here in the Punjab. This particular version was a 55-gallon drum lined with firebrick, with a place for a wood fire underneath.

The balls of dough at the bottom of the first photo are made into thin flat circles by slapping a ball of dough rapidly back and forth between the hands. A circle is then affixed to a cloth-covered stone and then smacked onto the inside of the tandoor, as you see being done in the top photo. The young cooks were using a stone for that; the older one was doing it by hand.

The bottom photo shows a chapati baking on the side of the oven. When it is done it is lifted out with the tongs (which look like they are made from rebar), and rubbed over a large hill of butter, and served. Yum!! These were really good.