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Introduction

Tandoor bread or Tandoori bread (Arabic: خبز تنور‎ khubz tannoor), also known as taftoon bread is a type of leavened, single-layered flat bread baked in a clay oven called a tandoor, similar to naan. It is commonly consumed in South Asian countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and India as the main wheat-based product.

Tandoori roti is served in restaurants, hotels, industrial canteens and home. It is also gaining popularity in the continents of Asia and Europe. Preparation of the dough starts off by kneading the flour, water, and salt together, which is then formed into a disc of 2-3 millimeter thickness, 15-20 centimeter diameter and a weight of 50-60 grams. Once it is shaped, the dough is placed inside a special type of oven called a tandoor to bake. The dough is placed onto the pre-heated inner walls of the tandoor and allowed to bake for 37 seconds at [around] 425°C.

In Pakistan and India, tandoor bread is popular especially in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gujarat, Jammu, and Kashmir, Rajasthan, and Punjab regions, where naan bread is baked in tandoor clay ovens fired by wood or charcoal. These tandoor-prepared naans are known as tandoori naan.

History

Cooking food in tandoori oven has been around for approximately five millennia. Remains of the clay oven has been excavated in the Indus River valley, present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northwest India, Iran, and Central Asia.

Tandoori ovens are not prevalent in the average Indian home because they are expensive to install and maintain. Authentic Tandoori cuisine in urban areas can often be found in specialty restaurants. However, in rural areas in India like Punjab, the tandoori oven is considered a social institution, for a tandoori oven is shared among the community. Women would go to the oven place with atta or dough along with their marinated meats to meet up with their neighbors and friends, so they could converse and share stories while waiting for their food to cook. The people in cities once engaged in this social activity, but as businesses and commercialism grew in these areas, communal tandoori ovens became rare. It is not uncommon for people to bring food to their local bakeries to cook it there at a fair price.

Because of the growing inaccessibility of a tandoori oven in urban areas, especially in cities outside of Southern Asia, people have developed ingenious techniques to replicate the cooking process and the food without the use of the oven. Common alternatives include an oven or a grill fueled by charcoal or wood so the food will be infused with the smoky flavor.

Preparation

Tandoori bread is made by kneading flour, active dry yeast, salt, and water together until the dough becomes uniformly firm. Then, it is divided by serving sizes, proofed or set aside for fermentation, docked or poked holes through, and pasted to the walls of the oven until it reaches uniform thickness, develops small blisters on the top crust, and achieves a reddish brown crust color. Tandoor bread is commonly served with meats that were also cooked in the oven like tandoori chicken, seekh kebob, or chicken Moghlai. Meals made in the tandoori oven come out moist and tender, with a hint of infused smoky flavor, which makes it a special delicacy in Southern Asia.

Production and Chemical Composition

Production of Tandoor bread is based on seven different phases: survey of current practice, design and installation of a tandoor, and development of standardized procedure for tandoori bread production, development of an evaluation scheme for tandoori breads, development of a reference set of grain and flour samples, investigation of the significance of parameters, and investigation of the relationship between wheat and flour parameters and tandoori bread quality. Aroma, smell, appearance, color, and size, and overall texture are the general characteristics that are optimized by producers of tandoor bread. The texture and quality of tandoor bread are determined by the percentage of wheat protein, the number of essential amino acids, and type of flour present in the bread. Various studies have demonstrated that the chemical and biochemical composition of flours affects the flour’s ability to interact with the other ingredients in tandoor bread.

Response surface methodology (RSM) is a process which allows for development of palatable tandoor breads that have a long shelf life and contain minimal amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Research suggests that, for optimal sensory and chemical stability of tandoori bread, the water level is 720 milliliters per kilogram, protein concentrations range from 10.3% to 11.5%, between 1.2% to 1.6% salt is added, and the bread is baked in temperatures ranging from 330 to 450 degrees Celsius^[1].

Health Hazards

There are 16 different polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons present in tandoor bread. PAHs and pyrogenic affects in tandoori bread cause it to be nearly 3.7 times as carcinogenic than other breads.^[3]