Stay in the country is a unity with nature. I want to cook on fire, sit by the fire, listening to the twilight rustlings. To cook food on fire, barbecue or barbecue is most often used, and we suggest you make your own tandoor. What it is? This is an oriental oven-roaster, which allows you to cook a lot of delicious dishes, which otherwise it is simply impossible to cook. Samsa, pita bread, oriental meat - all this can be done in the tandoor. Moreover, the meat is very tasty, because it is suspended in a horizontal position, as a result, the fat does not drip on the coals, but flows down into pieces of meat, making it juicy and soft.
It’s very interesting, in the opinion of the European, in the tandoor cakes and samsa are prepared - they are attached directly to the walls of the oven and baked in this way.
The traditional shape of such an oven is round. It can be located both above the ground and underground. Today, many summer residents build a tandoor of brick, it is not so difficult to make it, but the oriental cuisine will bring a lot of pleasure to both family members and guests.
In the East, the tandoor can be located in the house, it is installed in the center of the room to warm the air in the room in the cold season.
Option # 1 - making a brick tandoor
A small tandoor can be made on a platform with wheels, you can transport it to any place in the garden.
If the furnace is stationary, it is better to place it on stony or sandy soil, away from buildings and green spaces. The land under the tandoor should be dry.
How to make a tandoor? For construction, you can use stone blocks, ceramic clay bricks or white refractory bricks. First, the base is laid out. The brick tandoor is quite heavy, so the base must be strong. The base of the furnace is similar to the foundation in which an opening is made where the fuel is laid.
You can build a tandoor directly on the ground, in this case, under the base you need to dig a hole in the form of a circle, with a diameter of 120-130 cm. We pour sand to the bottom (layer 15-20 cm), and begin to lay out a brick well.
As a solution for masonry, you can use the finished furnace mixture. It consists of plasticizer, red clay and quartz sand. The masonry can be either horizontal or vertical, in the first case, the furnace will retain heat longer, the second is more economical - much less bricks are needed.
To visually see the dimensions of the future furnace, first you can make an order - masonry without mortar. We work with a brick grinder with a cutting diamond wheel for ceramics.
It is not easy to do round masonry, a life-size drawing made with a protractor and compass will help you, the ability to handle a grinder is not the last thing.
The pattern of bricks is the basis for the formation of a circle. Do not spare the mortar when laying, and use the level to check the horizontal position.
The tandoor is narrowed up - this is done so that the heat is kept inside. In order to achieve this effect, the lower layer of the brick must be cut off, when laying, the form will resemble a vault. After the masonry is ready, it is necessary to clean the interior of the furnace from traces of mortar. We use dry clay to fill the joints from the outside. The inner surface is also coated with clay, which is mixed with finely chopped grass.
When the oven dries, it is first heated with paper, and then the firing temperature rises. This is the easiest way to make a tandoor, and if you want to refine it, the design can be coated with clay. In the east, stoves are decorated with mosaic tiles, sandstone, and ceramics.
The video demonstrates how to make a brick tandoor using a template:
Option # 2 - tandoor from a wooden barrel
Of course, the brick tandoor is the most durable and practical, but you can use other methods if you wish, which we will talk about now. Here you need the skill of working with clay.
You need to find a small barrel with poorly fitted hoops. The barrel is impregnated with refined sunflower oil from the inside, for impregnation we leave it overnight.
Then we prepare a solution - sheep’s wool for reinforcement (length up to 15 cm), fireclay clay, fireclay sand. The ratio, respectively, is 0.05 - 1 - 2. We make a thick solution and sculpt the furnace body on the inner surface of the barrel (thickness - 20-30 cm). The solution is smoothed and dried for a week using incandescent lamps. Then the hoops can be removed and the barrel dismantled. After this, the product is subjected to secondary firing.
Option # 3 - a roasting pan using a plastic barrel
You will need a plastic barrel of a classic shape. We fill it with water, after filling the barrel slightly increases in size, its outer surface is coated with chamotte mortar, it is compacted, smoothed until the contour of the furnace is formed. The product is also dried for a week, and then the water must be drained. The barrel will become smaller and can be removed from the new tandoor.
On top of the oven you can put a cauldron for cooking pilaf and other dishes, but for this you need to adjust the crown to the volume of the cauldron, the crown is coated with clay.
We examined several simple methods of making tandoor in the country. These are the simplest answers to the question of how you can make a tandoor with your own hands. More complex options offer the manufacture of a design resembling a Russian stove, but it is a cumbersome structure and it is rather troublesome and difficult to build, and a simple tandoor is quite suitable for a summer house and the dishes in it turn out to be very tasty, try it and you will see for yourself.