[Sca-cooks] tannurs

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Wed Aug 4 01:51:29 PDT 2010


Adamantius answered my questions about a tannur with:
<<< The rationale is that dough-based products stuck to the walls of the tannur will stick to the rather porous limed inner surface (it's basically tile grout, sort of chalky), but not too tenaciously >>>

How were medieval/mass ovens typically lined? Different from these Indian/Asian ovens?

<<< because the dough will shrink at the edges as it cooks and begin to peel itself off the surface of the tannur, especially since the wet dough has an instant jet of steam built up between the hot wall and itself. Often what happens it that the trick to removing the cooked bread or pastry is to know exactly when to go in after it with a long hook: it has puffed up enough to be fully cooked, and also to push itself off the wall; the experienced baker knows when it's expanded as much as it'll go without launching itself off the wall and onto the coals. >>>

The entrance to the oven is usually covered over, correct? So you can't really see the bread baking. This sounds a bit tricky knowing when to open the oven and pull off the bread. Late enough that the bread is baked well enough, but not so long that any have fallen off into the coals.

So if there are coals, does this mean a tannur is not a mass oven? Where the oven is heated up to temperature, all the coals are raked out and the food is then put in and is baked by the retained heat only? I that case there wouldn't be any coals to be concerned about the bread falling onto.

Stefan
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THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****





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