I’ve always dreamed of having a tandoor in my garden, but never really dared to build one… I got the urge during a trip to India.
But do you know where this recipe for marinated meat coated with yoghurt mixed with various spices (garam massala ginger, garlic, cumin, cayenne pepper) got its name?
The tandoor? It’s this vertical, jar-shaped oven. Made of earth or bricks, and buried in the ground, it originated in the Punjab region of northern India and in Uzbekistan, an Indo-Pakistani region, 
Filled for several hours with embers, it would receive the food when the fire was out. Virtually every inhabitant had this type of oven, in which they could prepare: two types of bread or patty, naan and chapati, tandoori murg (chicken) and boti kebab (lamb-based recipe), as well as machi tikka (tandoori fish) in the Bombay region.
In fact, everything cooked in the tandoor is called tandoori, whether vegetables, bread or meat. Meat is usually introduced on skewers or spikes, and bread cakes are cooked right on the oven walls.
So, without a tandoor, there’s no tandoori chicken?
A priori, you might say, without a tandoor, there’s no tandoori chicken, since tandoori isn’t a recipe but a way of cooking food over a wood fire! Yes and no, because tandoori also refers to a blend of spices (a massala) used to marinate meats before cooking them… in the tandoor.
Massala for Tandoori chicken
As with all Indian subcontinent cuisine, spice blends (misleadingly called curries) vary from cook to cook. What characterizes tandoori massala is its red color, essentially carried by sweet paprika or stronger chili pepper. It can be enhanced by coloring – which is what Pakistani restaurants do – but I remind you that the red is obtained by cochineal, a cool little mite ground to a powder and which, I’m sure, would rather live elsewhere than die stupidly on your plate. As you can see, I don’t use it. I prefer the natural color of spices, so no dyes.
