Fire and Dough at the Back of the Restaurant

My college roommate's family owns a small Punjabi restaurant two towns over. In September, she invited me to come in early on a Sunday, before opening, and learn to make naan from her father.

The tandoor is a clay oven, sunk into the floor, so hot that the air above it shimmers. Her father, a quiet man with flour in his eyebrows, showed me how to stretch a ball of dough over a round cushion and slap it against the inside wall of the oven. The trick, he said, was to be brave. "Hesitate and you burn your arm."

My first naan fell into the coals. My second stuck but tore. My third puffed up perfectly, blistered and golden, and he pulled it out with a long iron hook and handed it to me with a nod.

We ate it standing in the kitchen, hot, brushed with butter and garlic. He told me how he'd learned from his own father in a village outside Amritsar. I drove home with flour on my shoes and the taste of it still in my mouth.