Tandoor Oven
The Asian Cafe and Bakery features the food from Central Asia including Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakistan and Tajikistan. The bread and samsi pastries are baked in the traditional tandoor ovens. The breads actually stick to the walls inside the oven as they bake.
Section:Picture story
Samsi await placement in a tandoor oven at the Asian Cafe and Bakery, July 12, 2011 in Spokane, Wash. The traditional Central Asian pastries are filled with beef, onions and spices.
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Andrey Chumov and Ivan Gorbenko place samsi dough into tandoor oven. The oven was flown from Uzbekistan to New York and then trucked to Spokane to be installed. The oven’s walls are about 9-inches thick and one of the layers includes clay mixed with camel hair like all traditional ovens. Earth-toned tiles cover the outside of the traditional oven.
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Samsi dough is placed into the insides of a tandoor oven. Each day before it is used, the oven is cranked up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to clean the walls of the dough from the previous day’s baking. Then it is turned down to 500 degrees. Once the pastries are placed inside it is turned down again to 360 degrees while the samsi are baked for 15 minutes.
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Andrey Chumov and Ivan Gorbenko places the final samsa into the tandoor.
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Samsi are scrapped from the walls and removed from the tandoor oven.
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Andrey Chumov removes samsi from the tandoor oven. He and his family dreamed about starting a restaurant for about a decade before they opened the Asian Cafe and Bakery on East Sprague Avenue.
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Samsi are turned and cooled on a tray after being removed from a tandoor oven.
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