Delicious Chicken Shawarma At Home

This is my go-to recipe for easy and authentic chicken shawarma at home! You’ll get all of that bold, classic street food flavor but none of the hassle.

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Chicken. Hold on. How do I say it again? Chicken. Shawarma. Shawarma. Perfect. Say it with me. Chicken. marinade cuz this is going to take the longest. Into a bowl, I’ll add some yogurt. That yogurt is going to work to tenderize our chicken. Then some tomato paste. That’ll give us our umami and color. Then I’ll grate in three cloves of garlic. This is going to turn our garlic into a nice paste and we don’t have to go through the slow pain of mincing it this way. Then we’ll add the zest of a whole lemon. Maybe you’ve heard this before, maybe you haven’t, but the zest is where we’re going to get all that true powerful lemon flavor. Not so much the juice. Things are starting to smell good in here. But what the juice will help with is adding in some nice acidity. I almost always prefer lemon juice over vinegar. But that said, we are going to also add in some white vinegar just for balance. And then for our dry spices, we’ll add in some ground ginger, some Aleppo pepper flakes, a bit of sugar just to balance everything out. A little smoked paprika, my favorite, a pinch of cinnamon, some turmeric. That’ll give us incredible color. The tiniest pinch of allspice, a little coriander, a pinch of cardamom, a generous pinch of cumin, a little salt, and to finish, I’m going to chop a yellow onion in half and grate it directly into this mixture. The reason we grate it is to release all of those nice onion juices. So yes, there’s a very good chance this is going to make you cry. But also think on the bright side. Are you going to be crying in a little bit when you eat this incredible homemade schwa? Probably not. Give this a nice mix. What we’ve made just now is an absolutely killer marinade for your chicken. And then optionally toss on some gloves and add in your chicken. This part’s not optional. I’m using chicken thighs here because later in this video, we’re going to mimic that really hard sear that you’d see from a street vendor serving the same thing. And this will hold its moisture much better than a chicken breast. All that’s left for now with our chicken is to give this a nice good massage. It’s going to smell so good right now that you might want to grab a piece of this chicken and taste it raw. But don’t do it. Once that’s fully mixed, cover it up with plastic wrap and toss that in the fridge while we finish the rest of our steps. While our chicken marinates, let’s make our first sauce. There are two sauces in this recipe. You don’t have to make both, but I would suggest it. And this one’s a little bit more challenging, so that’s why I’m going to start with it. The first one is called Tomb. It’s the super garlicky, creamy sauce, and the main ingredient is garlic. Along with the garlic, I’m going to add a splash of water and then a little pinch of salt. And before we do anything else, we’re going to blend this up into a fine paste. If you need to stop it once in a while and sort of scrape down the edges, that’s okay. Just be very, very careful. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t stick your fingers in there. Repeat the process of scraping down the sides and moving things around a little bit until you don’t see any large clumps anymore. You should really only need to do this about two or three times. Great. Now, this is the challenging part. We’re going to create something called an emulsion. And a good example of that is mayonnaise or a vinegrett. It’s basically when you force two things together that don’t really want to be together. So I’ll turn this on and for about the next 5 to 7 minutes, I’m going to slowly drizzle in a little bit of oil at a time and let the garlic take on that oil. And again, this is no different than making mayonnaise, but instead of adding oil to garlic, you’d be adding it to egg yolks. It’s kind of a fun fact, actually. A lot of people don’t know that mayonnaise is made from just egg yolks and oil. If I take this off and you look at the edge, you can see that it’s starting to get foamy. This is the very start of what we’re going for. And by the end, this will be smooth and white and fluffy. Give this a little mix. Make sure all the garlic is getting in there. The reason I’m doing this so incredibly slowly is if you go too fast, it’s going to split. The two things that we’re trying to push together aren’t going to come together. It’s a slow and gradual technique, but it’s worth that final outcome. My arm’s getting tired. If you want, you can find a really nice angle like this where you do this slow and gradual pour, and you can hold at that angle for a while as long as the sauce doesn’t look like it’s all of a sudden doing something that it’s not supposed to. Let’s check it again. Ah, see, it’s kind of starting to look like a white soup now. And it’s going to continue thickening up. But this is good. Got to keep going. It’s starting to smell really good, too. If you close your eyes, you can actually start to hear it changing in consistency. And that’s one of the things that I love so much about cooking is that it uses all five senses all the time. Watch this. See how it sinks to the middle now? It’s much slower. You’ll see it thicken up more and more as we go. We’re almost done. Don’t get overly excited now and dump in all your oil. Don’t ruin all your progress. Keep going slow. The garlic mixture needs to accept the oil. Let’s see how high I can go. That’s pretty good. That’s also the perfect stream of oil right there. That’s about how thick you want it to look when you’re pouring. And it looks like we are at the very end. So, check this out. There it is. Now, it can hold on the top of my rubber spatula. How amazing is that? If you want, you could try adding even more oil to make this even thicker, but at a certain point, you run the risk of it splitting and not accepting too much oil. So, for me, this is the perfect consistency. The only last thing we need to do to finish it up is take a whole lemon, then add it right in there. You got to do this part at the end. And then one more quick pulse. That’s it. Our tomb is done. At the end there, the lemon juice thickens it up to the point that it almost now does look like a mayonnaise. Check out once I add this to a bowl how thick and fluffy this really is. And then try to think back to how this all started. It still blows my mind that this works the way it does. All we’re going to do now is cover this up and then toss it in the fridge to sit there with our chicken. Our second and final sauce only takes a few seconds. First, you’ll want to get a bit of really hot water. I got this fun little boiling water machine cuz I use it so often. But make sure whatever water you use for this is nice and hot. And then grab a few garlic cloves and give them a nice smack. That was the only thing I was using this cute little pan for today and he did a great job. Add that garlic back to your bowl. Then pour over that boiling water. And we’ll let this steep kind of like a garlic tea for just a few seconds while we prep the rest of our stuff. Into a bowl, I’m going to add some tahini. Tahini is literally just blended up sesame seeds. Nothing else. It’s a great way to get a super powerful flavor of sesame. Now, lemon. Get all of that lemon juice into your tahini. Squeeze. And then we’ll go in with a little pinch of salt. And by now, our garlic tea should be done. Oh, that’s disgusting. Hold the garlic back and pour in the water. My mouth is going to taste so bad the rest of the day. Then give this a nice mix until it’s even in consistency. Weirdly, even though it doesn’t really make sense, adding water will actually thicken up your tahini. So, all I’m going to do is refill my little garlic tea container and add a little more water just bit by bit until I reach that nice creamy consistency that I’m looking for. Suddenly, it goes from this really harsh tasting paste to a nice light, really creamy texture. Let’s give it a taste. Oh, it’s so good. Now, just season to taste. A little more salt. And once it’s perfect, we’ll set it at room temperature until we’re ready. That’s delicious. Our chicken is marinating. Our sauces are done. Now, we have to make a very quick and simple salad. Why are we making a salad? Well, we have all kinds of richness in the sauce. So, this is going to be some nice combination of acidic, herby, crunchy, and it’ll really balance everything out. I’m going to start by chopping up a few small cucumbers. Next up, we’ve got some red onion. Same thing. I’m going to chop it up into some nice small pieces. And you really don’t have to take this salad too seriously. If you chop up your onion and you see any pieces that you still don’t like, you can go ahead and give it one last extra chop here. Scoop this up into my bowl. Next up, tomatoes. I got them on the vine because they’re always tastier and fresher that way. And I’m feeling to find some of the firmer ones. And then, same thing, I’m just going to chop those up. These are beautiful tomatoes. They’re so bright red. Some people take out the inside piece like this and they just keep the outside. Usually I leave it, but I’m going to remove them. I don’t want it to make my salad all mushy. And now I’m just going to chop these up. It’s funny how sometimes it’s hard, even with a sharp knife, to cut through the skin of a tomato. So instead, I’ll often just flip them over like that. And then it’s easy to slice through. Make sure there’s no giant chunks in there. And then in we go. This is starting to look beautiful, but it would not be complete without some fresh herbs. Here I’ve got parsley. And here I’ve got dill. probably my favorite fresh herb to work with. For these, I’m just going to pick off the ends. What I’m doing is just sliding my fingers, almost my nails, all the way down so that I don’t hurt or bruise the herbs. Same thing with the dill. I’m not measuring. I’m just eyeballing it. But I will tell you this, my grandfather was Persian, and you really can’t make much Middle Eastern cuisine without beautiful fresh herbs. So, it’s one of my favorite things to have in the kitchen at home. I mean, honestly, I don’t really grow it myself, but my brother does. I just use it. I’m going to give this a rough chop. I’m being very purposeful with the knife so I don’t bruise any of my dill. And same thing with my parsley. It’s okay to leave a few larger chunks as well. Our salad is going to be perfect either way. We’ll gather up those herbs. As you can see, I’m doing a lot of herbs compared to the vegetables, which I love. Such amazing flavor. And now I’m going to finish it off with a little bit of red wine vinegar, a tiny bit of sugar, pinch of salt, and finally just a little bit of olive oil. And before we finish, I’ll give it a quick stir. Get every little piece that’s in here evenly coated. And most salads have a dressing, but we don’t need to make a dressing, especially because we don’t want this too wet. Not only do we not want too much moisture for when we assemble the shawada at the end, but also it’s going to make its own dressing while it sits there and releases all the juices. I don’t even have to season. This is good. Since we’re assembling soon and I also don’t want this to get soggy, I’m just going to leave it at room temperature right next to our tahini sauce. Last step before cooking our chicken is to make our French fries. I’m going to add some oil to a small pot and then get this going over high heat. I’m not going to make the fries homemade. It’s actually really hard to make fries at home where they stay nice and crispy. And for the schwarma, since we’ve already made so many components, I don’t feel like we actually have to make our fries homemade. Normally, I like to make everything homemade. But there’s something about these ready to go frozen French fries that I just love. To finish up our workstation, I’ll add a sheet tray lined with a wire rack as well as a spider to scoop my fries out when they’re finished. And once our oil has reached the proper temperature, we can carefully drop in some of our fries. I’m trying to grab all the longer ones cuz that’s going to work best in our schwarma. Once those are in, I’m going to give them a quick mix to make sure nothing sticks together. Always check your oil temperature again once you go to fry anything cuz that temperature is always going to go down when you add something colder to it. And if you’re watching this video and you’ve decided to make your fries homemade, good for you. That really is awesome. But I would just say make sure they stay crispy whatever you do. These really are such an important component to shawa and you need that nice fluffy crunch. Doesn’t taste right without it. We’re almost there. They’re starting to look nice and golden brown. Certainly looks good. Oh, great crunch and perfect fluffy interior. These look done now. So I’m going to toss them off to the side. The reason we have the wire rack is so they can drain off that oil. Listen to that. They’re so crispy. You can probably even hear the snap of these fries. Listen. Can’t forget to hit them right away with a bit of salt. That’s going to stick to the little bit of oil that’s still on these fries. We have to build flavor and seasoning as we go. And now I’ll just rest these at room temperature while we cook our chicken. Stay there. It’s time to cook our chicken. But I’m guessing I can probably count on one hand how many of you watching this video have one of these. The only reason I have one is because I recently made a rotisserie chicken for a bear and had to cook in the wilderness. True story. But since I understand why most people don’t have a vertical rotisserie at home, I’m going to show you how to do it with just a stove top and a pan. All you do is grab a heavy bottom pan like this. Can also use cast iron and add in a generous amount of oil. Enough that you’re covering the bottom of your pan. It might look like a lot of oil, but it’s going to allow the oil to climb up into the nooks and crannies of the chicken and give extra crust, which means extra char, extra flavor. Let your oil heat over high until it really starts to shimmer. Then add in your chicken thighs away from you. If you’re doing this right, it’s going to be hot, so be careful. I’m leaving plenty of space here between all the chicken thighs so that they don’t steam. We want them to get a nice dark crust. And we’re also going to weigh them down with these weights here, just so that they get that really nice, even hard contact against the pan. These ones look great. Wow, they’ve been really pressed down there. And when you start to feel like you’re getting a crust, you can go ahead and flip. because of the yogurt that’s in this marinade. You might lose a few pieces of the chicken to the pan when you flip it. But it doesn’t matter as long as you have those nice dark charred spots. Those spots right there are what are going to mimic the flavor that we would have gotten by cooking this against an open flame. You can give the pan a little shake like this and some of the fire might creep up into there, giving you even more flavor. My chicken is done. I have more char flavor than I could ever want. This is the perfect balance of tender cooked chicken and char that I’m looking for here. Now that I’m ready to plate, I’m going to pull all my different components up to my cutting board. Oh yeah, they’re still crunchy. Salad still crunchy. Traditionally, chicken shawadara would be wrapped in Arabic bread or saj, but I’m going to be using this. And to finish things up, I’ll grab a few pieces of chicken. I’m going to cut these the long way, so they’re nice long strands in there. That’s going to be amazing when it comes to the texture. And as a first layer, I’m going to go right down the center with some tomb. Then I’ll go on with some of my fries. As you can see, I’m layering vertically. It’s the only way to do it. Then my chicken. Then I’ll drain off some of the liquid from my salad here and add on some of that salad. Then last but not least, I’ll go down the whole thing with some of my tahini sauce. And to finish, a few Lebanese pickles. And for the grand finale, going to place it down on some parchment. And then roll it on up. And just so all of our hard work doesn’t fall apart, going to lightly tie it up. And that is how you make chicken schwata. I wish I took a bite. Why didn’t I take a bite? I’m going to come back in and get it. [Music]