The traditional way to smoky meats, pillowy breads
By Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent | May 9, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2007/05/09/the_traditional_way_to_smoky_meats_pillowy_breads/
In the lull between lunch and dinner, Grain and Salt is quiet. Owner Syed Shabbir, 40, sits on a chair, legs crossed and hands folded. After managing The Bombay Club in Harvard Square for seven years, he's glad to have his own place. Shabbir is Muslim and so his new spot is certified halal. A steady trickle of his fellow Muslims pick up orders of pizza topped with tandoori chicken tikka and steak boti kebab sandwiches. There are also college students from the subcontinent looking for a taste of home and desperate Chowhounds who have heard about Shabbir's food.
The menu comes from all over India, popular dishes from Goa to the Himalayas, including smoky meats and pillowy breads from the tandoor oven.
The tandoor is a barrel - shaped clay oven heated on the bottom with gas. It gets blazing hot, about 500 to 800 degrees, so when skewered meat is lowered into the hottest part, it emerges smoky and fragrant, crisp on the outside and juicy inside. Flatbreads like naan, a simple round, and lacha paratha, a twisted whole - wheat round, are slapped against the hot walls of the tandoor, where the dough sticks, bubbles, and bakes quickly.
Traditionally, tandoor ovens in India were shaped with pieces of mud built up in layers, smoothed by hand, and left in the sun to harden. In Bombay, where Shabbir grew up with five brothers and sisters, his family had an outdoor kitchen overlooking the rose gardens, with a tandoor oven bur ied in the ground. The family's cooks heated it with chunks of hardwood.
In this country, some ovens are fired with charcoal but most are fueled with gas. Shabbir thinks that live fire is overrated; it's also against fire codes. "It is the clay and the drippings that create the aroma," he says. "Actually, this is the first time I've had a gas oven. The new code forbids the use of charcoal. But I don't notice much of a difference at all. Plus, the gas is easier to use. It is easy to turn up and down and easy to maintain temperature."
Almost everyone who eats at Grain and Salt orders naan, which comes plain, brushed with garlic butter, or stuffed with ground lamb. Bishal Thapa, 31, the chef in charge of the tandoor, is the master of the naan. He's Nepalese, but grew up in Hong Kong and learned to cook in England, where Indian food and its many regional differences is prized.
It takes an hour for the tandoor to get hot enough to cook naan. If the walls are too cool the bread won't stick. When it reaches temperature, Thapa takes a ball of dough, shapes it over a "pillow" (something he made from a sponge wrapped in a dishtowel), then slaps it on an inside wall. "Naan is supposed to be soft," says Thapa. "If it cooks too slow it will get hard. If it cooks too fast it will burn." He uses two iron skewers to handle the sticky dough. One has a hook at its tip, the other a shallow spoon. When the bread is ready, he holds the naan with the hook and scrapes it off the sides with the spoon. It comes out puffy, beautiful with blisters. He brushes it with butter and tears off a piece to try it.
Shabbir thinks that kebabs and tandoori chicken, which have no sauces, don't go as well with naan as they do with chewy parathas. Where naan is a simple yeast-leavened flatbread, lacha paratha is whole-wheat flour, water, and butter coiled and rolled out.
Thapa makes murgh malai kebab, a ground chicken kebab, to go with lacha paratha to demonstrate the theory. He flattens the shaped dough, presses it onto the pillow and tosses it on the side of the oven just like the naan. It emerges layered and crisp, open like a flower. He brushes it with butter.
He slides the chicken onto a skewer and drizzles it with oil, then lowers the skewer into the oven. "As the oil drips it will make smoke," he says.
Adds Shabbir: "That's what gives the wonderful taste to it." When it's cooked, Thapa tosses the smoky chicken with fresh mint and cilantro leaves, spices like dried mango and cinnamon, lime juice, and thinly sliced red onion.
We stand around the kitchen wrapping the chicken and onions in warm paratha. Shabbir waited a long time to own his own place and he's confident about what he wants.
"I will not compromise anything," he says. "And I know that it shows in the food. People like it here. They say that the food tastes like back home. That makes me feel good."
Grain and Salt, 431 Cambridge St., 617-254-3373. 
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