If you have ever tried to make the same dishes you enjoy at your favourite Indian restaurant, only to find that even though the food is delicious, the taste is never quite the same as in the restaurant. That is because the unique way that tandoors cook makes all the difference.

The ancient tandoor oven cooks in the same ways many of the high technology cooking appliances use as the most cutting edge and best ways to cook. Employing convection cooking, radiant heat cooking, and hot air cooking as well as the unique flavours found only when you expose food to the live fire of real wood, this old technology might just be the absolutely most perfect way to cook food.

Because people have been cooking with tandoors since about 3000 B.C., it is often assumed that they require special skill or are hard to use, instead they are one of the easiest ways to cook food. Simply put the food on the skewers, hang in the tandoor, put the lid on, and let the food cook. Unlike conventional grills or ovens you don’t have to tend the food, turning it, basting it or otherwise ensuring for even cooking. You will also find that you can cook many dishes in just a fraction of the time that you might need in a modern oven.

Tandoori cooking can be much healthier since you don’t need to cook your food in extra fats. In fact many of the extra fat will drip off during the cooking process in a tandoor oven falling down onto the coals and flame and actually helping to intensify the flavours while reducing the fat content of the finished dish. Vegetables cooked in the tandoor also have a wonderful flavour that will win over even those who are the most finicky.

The best advice we can give to someone who is new to tandoori cooking is to start simple. Take your meat of choice and simply add some salt and pepper, the same for your vegetables. This allows you to find out for yourself all the flavour that you will add to your food just by using the tandoori. From there you can experiment and add complexity to what you are cooking trying out curries, masalas, and other spices.