Cooking on Pathar (Stone)

There has been a lot of buzz around stone grilling/cooking recently, and a couple of restaurants are now based on this concept. A lot of restaurants in North India offer Pathhar Kebab - meats cooked on a hot stone. Naturally, excitement and curiosity kicked in big time and we decided to find out more. There is a lot of information on the internet on this topic. In the US you can buy a lava stone - which is the preferred stone - for your restaurant or for your home.

First we had no idea where to get a big enough lava stone from. So we decided to try the stone that is available to us - granite. We mounted it on our charcoal grill. Next dilemma, what would we cook on it? In a simple experiment, we put our current meat recipes on the stone, heated up with coals and wood fire. Lo behold - it worked. It worked better than our skillets.

It takes a couple of hours to get the stone hot enough to cook (given the size of the stone) but it retains heat evenly and for a longer time. It took us a while to get to the right thickness of the stone. The first few were too thin and cracked on heating. Now that we have the right thickness, cooking on the stone is a breeze. The rise and fall in temperature in never sudden and hence easily controlled. You can leave food on it unattended without the fear of it burning. Over prolonged use, the stone blackens. This we realized is called seasoning, which imparts better flavour and reduced cooking time.

We now make our Mutton Chops & Steaks, Pork Chops and Beef Steaks on the stone. We don't call these 'pathar kebabs' or any other fancy name. Instead on one big stone, we've ordered three small stones. They will heat up quicker and people who are averse to eating beef or pork are assured that the meats are cooked separately.

So come and enjoy these flavoured meats at The Farm. In the meantime, we'll figure out if we can do veggies on the stone.