What is the difference between grilling and barbecue in the United States and Indian grilling or Tandoor?
In this article, we would be addressing the different types of grills. They include the traditional United States grill known as barbecue and the Indian grill known as a tandoor. Before we talk about the fundamental difference between barbecue and tandoor, we would separately talk about the different grills for better understanding.
What is a Tandoor?
Tandoor refers to a particular type of grill(oven), mostly used in Asian and Middle Eastern countries such as India. Traditional tandoors get made of clay. They come with a cylindrical shape and an open top which allows for ventilation. Traditional tandoors are plated with mud. The mud functions as an insulating material. In the modern market, metal tandoors are now made available. Tandoors come in a variety of shape and sizes. Tandoor could range from a permanent structure to temporary structure, and come in large or small sizes.
Tandoors were used traditionally for a long time. They get used for cooking whereby you directly exposed the food to heat from a fire built at the bottom of the tandoor. A tandoor uses real light to cook.
A tandoor uses a systematic smoking method, convection cooking method, and a radiant heat method for cooking. The tandoor temperature could get as high as 480°C (≅ 900o). The foods cooked using tandoors are mainly Indian and Arabian foods.
What is Barbecue?
Barbecue refers to a traditional cooking method which people mostly used in the United States. It involved directly cooking without letting the food have direct contact with the fire. In this case, the food such as meat gets placed in a final pit. Fire contact gets avoided by the use of the smoke and low heat which radiates from charcoal or the smoke of a wood fire.
The temperature used for this process falls between 225-250 degrees. With this amount of heat, the food would take a more extended amount of time to get done. The barbecue cooking method gets used in a lot of homes, and restaurants.
Nowadays, use of barbecue does not pose as hectic because of the rise of technology such as metal ovens.
What Are The Key Differences Between Barbecue and Tandoor?
Area of Usage.
The tandoor cooking method get used in countries such as the Middle Eastern and Asian countries while the barbecue method gets used within western nations such as the United States.
Method of Cooking.
Tandoor cooking methods involve convection cooking, smoking, radiant heat, and live-fire.
Barbecue prepares food through indirect low heat and smoke.
Food.
Tandoor can cook a variety of food such as flatbreads, samosa snack, and meat.
Barbecue cook meat like Beef, chicken, and pork.
Cooking Temperature.
Tandoor makes use of a high temperature for cooking, while barbecue makes applications of low heat for cooking food.
Barbecue uses a low temperature.
Conclusion.
In a nutshell, you now know that tandoor and barbecue are two different methods of cooking. While barbecue requires low heat for cooking, tandoor needs high temperature to cook. Tandoor methods are used mostly in countries like Asia and India. Barbecue method gets used in great western nations.
However, the fundamental differences between these two methods are that, while barbecue can only be used to cook meat, tandoor cook a variety of food.
