Tendir Choreyi (Tandoori Bread)

First a quick note about tandoori bread (or tandoori anything, really). The name comes from the clay oven, or "tandoor" that it is traditionally cooked in, and you will never be able to duplicate the flavor of any tandoori recipe without one of those ovens, no matter how hard you try. Now, a tandoor oven is actually a part of my dream kitchen (I love naan bread and tandoori chicken) but I don't have one in my current kitchen, so this bread just goes in a plain oven, which makes it not very authentic. However, this is how an Azerbaijani stranded in the US would make a tandoori bread, so I guess I don't feel too bad about including it in my meal.

The ingredients for this bread are roughly similar to the ingredients for a basic french bread, but the shape is different and it is topped with poppy seeds which actually makes it quite beautiful in appearance. In fact this bread is quite possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever baked (my cakes certainly don't fall into that category). So as always I used my bread machine, but this time I didn't proof the yeast first. I just put it in the little yeast dispenser at the top of my machine, then added the water, flour and salt to the bucket. I put it on the dough cycle and then went and picked my kids up from school.

This bread uses very basic ingredients, including bread flour and salt.