Tamdyr in the yard - peace in the lands
November 12, 2017 | 17:02 |754
In any Turkmen house, where there is at least a small yard, you can see a round clay oven - tamdyr. Tamdyr has always existed in the everyday life of the people of the Caucasus, the East and Central Asia. It is very difficult to say how ancient this invention is. It is quite possible that tamdyr appeared at the dawn of humanity, when people, having decided to make variety in their mostly meat menu, learned how to grow wheat and make flour from it. So the tamdyr came after the broiling rack. During the excavations of the ancient country of Margiana, on the territory of modern Turkmenistan, archeologists discovered the remains of clay stoves, where the distant ancestors of the Turkmen cooked bread. There were many changes over the past millennia, the world itself has changed, but these simple structures remained unchanged, preserved in their primordial form.Vladimir ZAREMBO
At first sight, the tamdyr is a simple construction. All that is needed for its erection is water and clay. However, the reality is not so simple. The secrets of making tamdyrs were transmitted from generation to generation. People who make tamdyrs are called tamdyrchi.
The process of creating a furnace has its own unshakable rules. This is a cycle of successive actions. One missed link will crash the whole process. Take, at the very least, the clay. It should preferably be kaolin clay with homogeneous constitution. It should melt like plasticine, and not crumble in the hands.
Experienced masters – “tamdyrchi” know the places where they can get such clay, and use them for decades. Armenian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik and tamdyrs of other countries are differing little from each other. The Turkmen tamdyrs are no exception.
Clay is kneaded with the legs, adding wheat straw, and sometimes sheep or camel wool, to the mortar to increase the heat-accumulating properties of the furnace. Such a tamdyr serves for a long time, and does not crack from the heat.
Masters “tamdyrchi” roll balls from the finished clay, beat them to the ground, like a dough on the table, so that they turn into a homogeneous mass, then rolled into rolls. A circle is outlined on the ground and clay rolls are laid out along the circle - one above the other, until the walls of a tamdyr are about a meter high.
To give the tamdyr a spherical shape and a certain thickness, the walls are beaten with wooden dies. The neck of the tamdyr is patterned with a decorative ornament - clay welt. The surface of the furnace is polished so that it is smooth. Then tamdyr is dried.
The dried tamdyr is placed on a ring laid out of bricks, leaving a small hole at the bottom - an ash-pit. Sometimes tamdyr is additionally covered with a layer of brick on the outside for better preservation of temperature. Now it's ready!
Before starting the process of baking bread, in Turkmen “chorek”, the firewood is loaded into the muzzle, and heated continuously for several hours - internal firing of the surface takes place. After burning out the wood, when the soot is completely burnt out and the walls of the tamdyr become white, the tamdyr is ready for operation.
The internal surface, after cooling, becomes solid, and then the tamdyrchi add the finishing touch, they mold a patterned bas-relief on the wall of the tamdyr, usually a stylized image of the horns of argali. This element is considered by the Turkmens as an amulet designed to protect the hearth from evil spirits and other misfortunes, to protect the chorek and people who cook and eat it.
Immediately before use, the tamdyr is heated with firewood or brushwood, then ash is removed from the ash-pit, the ash-pit is closed, the internal walls of the tamdyr are sprinkled with salt water, after which the raw flatbread are stuck on the well heated inner surface. The upper opening is covered with a special cover.
The flatbread should be thrown into the oven very carefully, but dexterously, so that it does not lose shape and gently sticks to the wall.
Those people who have the relevant skills from early childhood can almost immerse themselves in the fire-breathing throat of the tamdyr, so that they can fasten the dough on the hot wall with a quick movement of the dough, and after 5-7 minutes with the same hand, but already protected by a special thick glove, remove from the walls a ready-made, heat-filled chorek.
The size of tamdyr depends on the number of flatbread placed in it. There are small tamdyrs, which are used to make six or seven choreks. There are also those that can hold forty pieces at the same time.
Now, instead of firewood, natural gas is often used. Of course, it's convenient, no burning smell, no smoke. But, undoubtedly, the most delicious chorek is the one that is filled with the smoke of saksaul.
Despite the seeming simplicity, the tamdyr is universal. You can bake not only chorek in it, but also prepare other flour and meat products. For example, pies (pirozhki), samosa, gutap - the most delicious Turkmen pies with spinach. You can also bake fish, wild fowl, lamb, vegetables and so on.
The aroma and taste of dishes prepared in tamdyr remains unsurpassed for saturation and quality. Due to the powerful heat transfer the food in the tamdyr is cooked faster than on the grill or in any other oven. In addition, such a process of cooking completely ensures the uniformity of roasting.
Tamdyr is an indispensable attribute of any village house. And it is not only in the village region. A round clay oven, full of heat, can be seen in the courtyards of the capital's inhabitants.
Why not?
The wheat is own, the flour is also own, so why not make chorek yourself, especially if the family has many children, to let the children know the taste of real chorek.
By the way, if you go home from work or just stroll around the city, and you are teased with the aromatic smell of hot bread that comes from the yard where women are ceremoniously performing near the tamdyr, you can feel free to come in, because no one will ever refuse to offer you a freshly baked chorek.
... There are a great many varieties of bread created by the imagination of bakers in the world.
You can add various spices in the bread - cumin, cinnamon, olives, mustard, sunflower seeds and other flavoring ingredients. You can change its color and shape. But it will be just culinary delights.
The most delicious is the fresh and simple bread, piping hot out of the oven or tamdyr, smelling of smoke and warmed by the hands of those who baked it.
