Spicy Harissa Chicken Shawarma on the Joetisserie | Big Joe Backyard BBQ

Fire up your Kamado Joe and experience next-level flavor with this Harissa Chicken Shawarma made on the Joetisserie. This spinning masterpiece features juicy, spice-marinated chicken thighs, slow-roasted over charcoal and wood for that authentic Middle Eastern taste. As the meat bastes itself, a tomato-onion drip pan sauce caramelizes below—blended into a savory topping that takes this dish over the top.

Perfect for entertaining, meal prepping, or leveling up your grilling game, this chicken shawarma recipe delivers bold flavor, crispy edges, and restaurant-quality results right in your backyard.

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Full recipe: https://www.kamadojoe.com/blogs/recipes/harissa-chicken-shawarma

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Hey there. Welcome back to Big Joe Backyard Bbecue. Today we’re cooking my all-time favorite thing to do on the Komado Joe. The greatest way to have chicken ever. Spinning chicken schwarma. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Now, schwarma is a heavily spiced Middle Eastern dish. And we’re starting with boneless, skinless chicken thighs. I’m going to use some extra virgin olive oil for a base. Then hit that with some kosher salt. I really like this. Uh you can get a schwarma seasoning from from most spots. Um or if you don’t have that, you can do bare berry. It’s a really nice Ethiopian spice blend or razel anoop. Then we’re going to do a little bit of a harissa blend in here. Not spicy, so if you don’t want it spicy, feel free to skip that. Then picked up this really nice trick to grate onion with a big cheese grater like that. Keep all the juice in there. That’s going to be really nice. I used to dice them, but I find that that’s a much better way to do it. Then we got some fresh oregano from the garden, fresh rosemary, and then a little bit of pepper. And then we’re just going to give that a really good mix. Get everything very well incorporated. And we’re going to marinate that overnight. To set up our schwarma, we’ve got our spit here and our tines. And we’re going to slowly work these chicken thighs down to the point where we can get one to two points of fixation on each one. And then we’ll push that down. And then because the thighs are kind of rectangular, we’re going to want to clock it so we have this nice even cylinder as we go. So, if we’re at uh 12 and 6:00 on our first one, we’re going to come in at 9 and three on the next. And just slowly, we’re going to be able to even out this cylinder here. We’re going to go all the way down. We’ve got our final cylinder here. Looks good. Now we’re going to get the other tine down. And you want to go through as many pieces of chicken as you can. Get it down pretty tight. But we’re going to do our final tightening on the grill itself because we don’t know exactly where this is going to center out yet. Let’s talk jotissery. So we want to make sure we set this up that we line up the words with the clasp right here. We want that nice and centered. And then you kind of want to go around the side and make sure that you don’t have too many cracks that you want this as even as possible because you can pull this in or out to make this as even a fit as possible. We’re shooting for 350° here. If you get above 400, I notice it tends to to burn a little bit. So with the jotissery, because of all the air flow, I’m cracked pretty tiny down at the bottom. And then up top, I’m at notch number one. And I like to set this up so that our charcoal is in the back with this divider. If you don’t have the divider, just bank the coals up towards the back. I find that gives you a lot more even heat because if you have charcoal all through here, your spit is going to be running horizontal here and you’re going to have more coals burning here in the center. So, I find that when I’m spinning meat tends to burn more if I don’t have this set up like that. So, I’m going to drop in two pieces of maple for a little bit of smoke. And then we’re going to get this set up. Now, the base of our sauce is going to be tomato, onion, olive oil. And I’m using this uh the Komado Joe Carbon steel half moon pan. I’ve played around with a lot of different pans. Find that these fit the best just because of the shape. And that’ll fit uh in any kind of pocket, even in the classic the the standard size. No issues there. And then I’m going to run the chicken right on top of that. So, we’re going to slide this in. And now we’re going to make our final adjustment to the chicken. So, we can slide this. So, we are right centered over. And we’re going to really crank the times now. This needs to be in very tight, very compressed. And we’re probably going to have to tighten it again as time goes on. But for our first spin, plan on about 45 minutes. You’re going to need a wireless uh thermometer to check temp every now and then. But we’re going to spin. Let this thing go. We are 30 minutes in. This is already looking magnificent. And I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different schwarma techniques. I love this stuff. One thing I’ve started doing is I take this fuagra mousse, kind of get a nice handful of it, and I I rub it up and down the schwarma. And what this is going to do is first, you know what? I’m going to spin this the other way. When it spins this way, it drips right down onto our tomato and onion sauce base. And as this melts down, it’s going to give us this beautiful crust on the chicken itself. And you can do this with uh duck fat, which I’ve done, which is also awesome. That’s a kind of bird-on bird action. You can do this with mayo and your schwarma seasoning base. Kind of make a little i aioli. But all that fat as it kind of uh you know goes through the mayard reaction here, it browns up everything really nicely and and gives you this beautiful crust and incredible depth of flavor. We’re 45 minutes in on the spin. Just going to check the outside pieces a little bit here. So we’re at 150 145. I’m going let that go another five 10 minutes. Now things get serious. We’re going to do our first carving. You can use your sharpest knife. I’ve done that a lot. You can use one of those turkey carvers, the the electric carver. Those work really well. You can get a schwarma shaver if you wanted to. But you want to be going as thin as possible. And I’m telling you, these like crusty, crispy little bites of chicken. See how juicy and tender it is here. Great crust here. And this is the best bite you’re ever going to get in your life on the Komado Jo. I guarantee it. This is my favorite thing to eat. Gather people around. This isn’t gonna The first carving is not going to be for your sandwiches yet. This is just going to be to reward those who have been by your side and helped you out. So feed the people that love you and they will love you back. So we ended up carving down to the level of the tines here. You can see that that’s going to determine whether you’re making two total carbs or three. But as we checked with the thermometer, it was cooked all the way to to this level. So with this, this is going to be our final piece of chicken that’s going to go back on to the grill. And since we got all those beautiful crusty bits off, I’m going to rub this with some more of that beautiful fuagra mousse so that we can get this whole thing kind of nice and brown as all this stuff will melt down and and rotate. And we’re going to watch the tomatoes and onions until they get some nice jarring till that looks done and pull it off. Probably around the 1 hour uh one and a half hour mark. But this is I mean I had a couple bites. It’s absolutely incredible. People are gonna go nuts for this. Now, one thing you definitely want to do at this stage is retighten your tines because we’ve lost some of the volume in here. So, just make sure you’re squeezing down. Everything is nice and tight. And then we’ll get this spinning again. We are an hour and a half into the tomatoes and they look done. I mean, we got some nice charring on the onion down there. Uh, the tomatoes have really kind of broken down and we’re going to go ahead and get that off the heat and into the blender. [Music] We just hit 2 hours on the chicken. This typically takes about an hour 45 until we get to this final part here. Uh, but this one took two hours. So, you just want to be checking on it and using your thermometer just to look for 165. You will typically when making schwarma like this, you will want to add in some more coals in there, especially when you’re banking up towards the back. It’s just going to use up the coals a little bit faster because you’re not using that many to begin with. But, this looks absolutely beautiful. And and definitely if you want to get this kind of browning on the chicken schwarma on round two, you’re going to have to hit it with some kind of fat, you know, be it duck fat, a little mayo with seasoning, or like we did with the fogra mousse. But this is spectacular. We’re going to take it off the heat. We’re going to take them off the spit as well and then slice the thighs nice and thin and get ready for our pa. We’ve got our chicken off the spit. Now we’re going to carve it up. I like to go as thin as possible. See, we got some really nice smoke in there, too. Very juicy. We’re going to get that all sliced up. Next, I I like to take the final product here and just get a little fresh squeezed lemon on top. I think this type of it’s like smoky grilled chicken and fresh lemon is just an awesome flavor combination. And now let’s build our sandwich. So I’ve done this with pita bread, just traditional, or with naan, which tastes incredible. Both are great moves. I’ll warm up the pa, kind of tear the top off so we can start filling this little pocket here. And then we’re going to take the tomato onion sauce we made before. Start with that as our base. And we’re going to add in a generous portion of the chicken. Top that with some more sauce. Then you could throw in some cucumber in there. I’ve got this really delicious spicy sauce called shoo s c h ug that’s from Yemen which really kicks up the heat on this thing. It is spicy. You can make your own. You can get it at your Middle East markets potentially. Other potential sauces that I’ve done with this that are incredible. If you want to go the Lebanese route, you have tum t o u m. That’s this whipped garlic and oil concoction that is I mean one of the great all-time global sauces there. This is going to be a pretty traditional Israeli flavor profile with tomato, onion, the shoo, and the chicken. Uh but you could also throw in uh some cucumbers. You could throw in humumus in here. I’ve also made my own sauce with Greek yogurt or sour cream, a bunch of the Middle Eastern spices. You can put that in there with some fresh lemon. That tastes awesome. But this is what we got right here. Chicken schwarma on the jotissery. Man, that tastes like home. I mean, that is spicy with the shoo, but the like umami blast you get on the tomato, the smokiness on the chicken. I mean, this is absolutely delicious. And it’s one of the healthier things I make. I mean, this is just really good quality protein, vegetables, tastes great. If you’ve made this schwarmo before, drop us a comment. Let us know how you make it. If you got any great tips, but thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it.