Tandoori flavours at home
Maunika Gowardhan explains why India has the best street food
Chicken tikka masala is a much-loved dish, but it’s only scratching the surface of delicious food cooked in a tandoor.
The tandoor – a clay oven used in a lot of Indian cooking – offers a world of possibilities, and that’s something chef Maunika Gowardhan is keen to uncover.
It’s not like there’s just one type of chicken tikka. From murgh malai to reshmi tikka, the options are endless – and Gowardhan, 44, had the best exposure possible growing up in Mumbai.
“I grew up on really, really good street food – India is such a vibrant, diverse space. In every region you find some sort of street eat somewhere, and every corner of the country will have some sort
of kebab or tikka,” she says.
“Sometimes, books can have one or two of those recipes – you can’t have a whole book on just that” – and that’s what Gowardhan has set out to change in her latest cookbook, Tandoori Home Cooking.
She wants people to recognise the history of the tandoor: “What really sets it apart, for me, is that it’s a cooking technique that is dated back to the Indus Valley [from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE]. It’s something that is so historic, that has so much of a rich heritage – it’s such a vital part of how we eat, not just in the streets of India or in restaurants, but even in our own homes.”
Even though most homes in India don’t have a clay oven, there are plenty of techniques to replicate that smokey flavour.
“When you have a look at the way a clay oven works, essentially it’s heat that’s 360 [degrees],”
Gowardhan explains.
“In our domestic kitchens, the endeavour is to replicate that – conventional ovens provide heat in an encapsulated space. So they are similar, but they’re not the same.”
The main difference is the coals at the bottom of a tandoor – when fat drips from any meat or anything else you put in the clay oven, it drips onto the coal and the smoke that is produced gives the food that “charred, grilled smokey flavour”, she says.
But how can you get that at home? One of Gowardhan’s genius tips is making smoked butter.
“You can store it in the fridge, and when you start basting your food with that smoked butter, you’re getting the charred, smokey flavour that you’re really yearning for in tandoori dishes.”
Not that Gowardhan has been perfecting smoked butter from a young age.
“I’m going to put my hand up here and say when I first came to England [25 years ago], I didn’t know how to cook Indian food,” Gowardhan, who now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, confesses.
She came to the UK for university, during which she was “thrilled” to be away from her parents with that “sense of freedom”.
After moving to her first house and getting a job in London, Gowardhan says: “It slowly creeps up on you – when you go to an unfamiliar place, what you really miss is that familiarity.”
lTandoori Home Cooking by Maunika Gowardhan is priced £25. Photography by Issy Croker.