Shaan Catering Tandoor Clay Oven — Mobile Gas Tandoor, ETL Certified

Built to be moved. The Shaan catering tandoor goes out to weddings, festivals and off-site events, gets set up on site, runs a service and comes home — then does it again next weekend. It is also the tandoor a small takeaway buys when there is no room for a full restaurant oven.

Transport is what breaks a clay oven, not cooking. The clay body here is braced with metal rings and finished with a hardened inner surface, so it takes the vibration of a truck bed and the knocks of a loading ramp. That reinforcement is the difference between an oven that survives a season of events and one that arrives cracked.

Shaan tandoors are made in the United Kingdom by Tandoori Oven Ltd. Nishi Enterprise Inc is the authorized distributor for the United States and Canada, with parts held in South Plainfield, New Jersey.

Features

• Sized to travel — fits through a standard doorway and onto a truck without a crane or a pallet jack
• Metal ring reinforcement with a hardened inner surface — braced for the vibration of transport, not just the heat of cooking
• 2 inch stone clay body — holds enough heat to run a service where there is no time to reheat between courses
• Triple-layer insulation — matters more outdoors and in a marquee, where the oven is standing next to people
• Gas safety valve with thermocouple and pilot igniter — the burner shuts off on flame loss, which is what you want on an unfamiliar site
• Natural gas as supplied, convertible to LP — propane is usually the only option at an outdoor event
• Stainless steel shell on 4 inch swivel casters — rolls off the tailgate and into position
• Supplied with a naan bread pad, a stainless mouth cover and 1 lb of maintenance clay

Certification

Working off-site means being inspected somewhere new each time, often by someone who has never seen a tandoor. A listing mark settles the question on the spot. Shaan tandoors carry the ETL Listed Mark to ANSI Z83.11 and the cETL Listed Mark to CAN/CSA-1.8 for gas safety, plus the ETL Sanitation Listed Mark to NSF/ANSI 4, and both listings are searchable in Intertek's Directory of Listed Products under Tandoori Oven Ltd or Nishi Enterprise Inc.

That combination did not exist in this category until January 2009, when Shaan became the first tandoor oven in the world to hold both. Tandoors had reached the US as an import category with no gas listing and no sanitation listing, and operators kept finding out at the wrong moment.

Installation and transport

Indoors, the oven goes under a Type I commercial exhaust hood per the International Mechanical Code and NFPA 96, with the gas connection made by a licensed installer under NFPA 54. Outdoors, follow your local fire code and your venue's own rules, and keep the clearances to combustible material given in the manual. Delivery to you is by freight; after that the casters and the reinforced body are what let you move it yourself.

Specifications

No warranty is offered on the clay pot. Hairline crazing is a natural characteristic of fired clay under repeated heat cycling and does not affect cooking; the maintenance clay supplied with the oven is for exactly that.