William Bronson

I am interested in building a tandoori oven.
I have never used one, and I need to know if the interior can be made of metal or refractory cement, instead of clay.
I know a few commercial models use steel, but most of them are lined with clay
I've seen one made of refractory cement, but that maker never made naan on his.
I'm leaning towards clay inside a steel shell, fired in place.
This clay in particular:
https://www.dickblick.com/products/standard-clay-company-239-raku-clay/

Making naan is the foremost goal, but I plan to also make pizza and loaves of bread and of course skewers .
I'm aiming to build one big enough to cook a whole turkey.
I also hope to set a (removable) stainless steel mixing bowl into the top, so I can approximate a Korean gamasot.
Tandoori ovens are remarkably like a Tlud charcoal making stove, and I  intend try making charcoal in mine.


I plan on insulating the oven.
Perlite,or vermiculite are normally what is used.
I might use stone wool.
Ceramic fiber insulation, if used , will not be in the flame path and will be sequestered.
I might even use a mud/sawdust mix.

I think the firebox could be made of something quite different than the oven proper.
It doesn't need to be a good surface to slap naan onto!
I'm eager to try firing the oven with different fuels, but charcoal/ wood will be king.



Rebecca, I am certain you have first hand experience with naan making, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
In particular, how deep does the oven really need to be, in your opinion?
I'm a long limbed galoot, with some fire resistance, but the thought of putting my hand full extension into an ear than oven gives me pause...

Mine are dying back right now,so I'm cutting the stalks and stripping off the leaves.
They are sitting in the car right now, getting a little solar drying.
These will be for our two pet bunnies as winter treats.

The leaves and any stalks that are already brown go right into a nearby bed or pathway.
I'm harvesting the roots for my neighbor who is doing a vegetarian farm to table catering gig.
I'm replacing them with pots of raspberry cuttings, though I'm putting a sunchoke and beans in each pot.

I can deal with slow going, as I plan on using the bed for tree starts alongside growing garlic.

In some of the videos online they even pre spout the corms.

I also bought some of the giant single cloves that are the next step from being corms.
These should become extra large head of elephant garlic in a single season.

You know your seed saver when you see the last of the season tomatoes, split and ruined and see next year's tomato plants.

When you miss foraging from a public peach tree grove, but you harvest the pits the racoons left behind.

When you cut the butt ends off your onions and plant them everywhere.

I've bought about 50 of these to start a perennial bed with.
I expect it will take years before they are in the perennial stage, that's not what worries me.
These the small hard cloves that grow around the roots of elephant garlic.

I've read they need to be peeled for them to sprout, but the farmer I bought them from doesn't seem to do that.
I've also reports where peeling them has not helped them., they still don't sprout.

Does anyone here have any firsthand experience with these corms?

I am not a canner but as an enthusiastic freegan, I eat some pretty sketchy things.
I'm not afraid to eat preserved food that has been boiled.
Even botulism toxin doesn't survive boiling.

I use that, and listening to my senses.
If it smells bad and tastes bad it is bad, no matter what a lab might say.
Which why I don't eat truffles, no gasoline fungus for me, thank you.

If there is a water bathing recipe that is not lab approved, say for pork, and it actually has botulism toxin in it, AND it doesn't smell bad, well as long as you boil it after you open the jar, I don't think there's an issue.
I could be wrong!

Boiled cucumbers are rather meh sounding to me, but the right ferments could work for you.
I would look for a local producer of fermented pickles and try a jar of their cucumber pickles.
If it's good and doesn't give you a reaction, you'll have a good starter culture on your hands.

Keeping the nails very short and using a nail brush has helped me seem presentable.
I wonder if some homemade playdough, some thing like salt dough, could be used to gather the dirt.

Blockbusters could have bought Netflix for peanuts, but compared to what they were making with their stores, it did not seem worth it.
Mail order movies were not worth it, even though it took less overhead, and streaming wasn't worth it either.
We know how that turned out.
The marginal land that was streaming is now pretty  much the way to get a yield in this sector.
Physical media is relegated to libraries, for now, as long as that lasts...

It's not a perfect analogy, but the high inputs that makes it possible to grow lots of food in places like California, are not going to last forever.
Once the fossil fertilizer and fossil water run out, land that have a lot of water and better natural fertility will become more important, even if they are in zone 6.
When my dad was a kid, oranges and bananas were treats you might get at Christmas, because they had to come from far way, like Florida.
Then came highways.
When I was a kid, oranges came from Florida and they were in every lunchbox.
Today, they often come from Brazil.
We are liable to see all of this reverse course as the vast resources it takes to live this way get used up.
If that happens, grapes grown in the clay slopes of Cincinnati might be the sweetest thing my descendents can get their hands on.
That won't be the end of the world, but if they decide they can't farm the slopes of Cincinnati because they are marginal land, they will be poorer for it.

Looked at another way, many unusual industrial choices were made during WW2 "for reasons if production economy".
This might mean one part on a gun was made of brass, to save steel for where it was really needed.
It also spurred wider adoption of new foods that people were not familiar with, like peanut butter.
There was a search for new materials, like rubber made from milkweed sap.
The shortages came from great need , but also because many  of the normal sources of rubber, steel, and food were in the hands of the enemy or otherwise inaccessible.
One source of food for the civilians that took pressure off the food needed for the military was Victory Gardens, which were grown on land previously not thought to be worth growing on.
Marginal land.

Marginal land is the best land, when it's the only land you have to grow needed food on.
Growing on it now gets us ready for when it's the only option for food.
It's a prep, like learning to shoot or how to tend to wounds.
It's like skinning your first rabbit before your starving, but less stressful, in my opinion.

It's also like trying to fix something you found in the trash.
Even if you fail to fix it, little harm is done.
If you start with rocks and clay and end up with clay and rocks, nothing is lost and lessons can be learned.
If you start with a rich loamy soil and end up with a dessicated crust, you have ruined decades or more of work.

For people who live on land where they farm, the marginal parts are liable to be their source for firewood, round wood deer meat, tree sap syrups and blackberries.
For people living in cities a bucket garden might mean a tomato to go with their beans and rice.
Growing up my father sometimes ate green beans for three meals in a day.
Grandma grew them and canned them.
He won't touch them now.
That was a hard way to come up, but it's part of how my grandparents sent all 4 of their boys to college.
The land was marginal, but it grew enough to make a difference generational difference.
Back in Alabama, some of the family had owned some good farmland.
Others worked as sharecroppers.
The political climate of that time and place made all of them sell,leave and never return.
You can have the best land and crops, but if you live somewhere where people burn down your childrens school, what kind of future is there for you?

Where I live, Cincinnati, we once had vineyards that were profitable, and grew cut flowers for export.
These are not viable businesses anymore, but clearly the land can grow food.

Roughly 50 percent of the calories consumed world wide come from grains.
The criteria for judging viable farm land probably focuses on the needs of these crops.

Which is a legitimate priority to have, in my opinion.
Few crops are as naturally storable compared to grains.
They can provide for man and beast alike.
They allow the accumulation of a multi-year surplus.
Of course that last characteristic could be said to be the source of many of our social maladies.
At this point that's just water under the bridge over the Rubicon that we burned after we crossed.

Yes of course they go down, it's just a question of where.

By keeping the vertical part of plumbing out from under your toilet and bathroom in general, you get different options for designing your building.
By keeping your plumbing runs in a wall chase you can access them without a sledge or jackhammer.

At work I am often entering large utility chases, and even though the space is tight, its much better than the crawlspaces I've been in.
They are usually multistory, with expanded metal flooring on each level.
I can imagine a central utility room acting as a big walk in chase, with laundry, bathing , toilet and kitchen clustered around it, in single family house.
Add your furnace and electrical panel , land line and Internet and basically you have an above ground basement, so what's the point?
Well basements are expensive, that's the point.
What if instead of the adding the other utilities to the first floor utility room, we add stairs to a utility attic?
Only the plumbing needs to be run through the foundation, everything else can probably go upstairs.
This mimics some of the commercial buildings I'm familiar with, with most of their HVAC equipment in their penthouse instead of in a basement.