This week we are graced with a guest post by Karl. He teaches us how to arrange a shawerma set up for a home grill. Serious props. Post below:
Shawarma background:
Shawarma is the big daddy of shish kebobs. Something about cooking meat on a stick enthralled Arabs throughout history. Usually, vertical shawarma machines cost over $200 and custom rotisserie attachments for grills up to $100. Here, me and my brother made a rotisserie out of Home Depot supplies. You'll need the following (runs roughly $20):
1. Grill with a rotisserie slot in the frame
1. Grill with a rotisserie slot in the frame
2. 5/16 inch stainless steel #18 threaded dowel
3. 4x 5/16 inch #18 thread wing nuts and 4x locking nuts
4. 4 washers
5. 2x 1/2 inch copper pipe hangers
6. 1/2 inch diameter copper pipe cut down to roughly 6 inches (we used an end cap)
7. 2 feet thick (2mm) metal wire or a clean, cut, metal clothes hanger (torque lock mechanism to keep the meat from spinning freely around the center rod)
You can see from this image the arrangement of nuts and how the pipe hangers connect the handle to the rod. You can modify it to fit your own grill. We added a bent metal rod adjacent to the main rod to lock the meat in place while spinning (torque lock) and covered the rod in foil to keep the chicken from ruining the threading. Once the meat cooks enough to stick to the foil and stops spinning freely, you can remove the torque lock.
We seasoned 9 pounds of chicken (aimed to feed 15-20 people) with allspice, salt, pepper and a touch of cumin and left the meat in the fridge overnight. Traditionally, cinnamon is also used, but due to a food allergy, we left it out. We also used half white meat and half dark meat for flavor. I don't have a pic of the chicken on the rod before cooking but here are some kebobs we made with the leftover bits.
We also made some garlic sauce. It contains 4-5 parts plain Lebanese yogurt to 1 part tahini with as much garlic as you think appropriate (typically one bulb of garlic or more).
Here we have the meat at various stages of cooking. We used a metal tray and a large, serrated knife to shave off meat as it cooked. We took turns spinning the handle for the 1.5 hours that it was on the flame.
Once the most of the chicken was gone, we made a single transverse cut along the rod to get the core off. This part tasted amazing as it was basting in its own juice for almost 2 hours.
You can see how the washers and wing nuts kept the meat in place here. Make sure you wash all the hardware before use!
This is one of many, many sandwiches we made. All we added was lettuce, tomato, garlic sauce, and pickles (not pictured).
Thank you Karl for the guest post. Next week we stay with the theme of BBQ and cook some ribs. We have a lot of awesome teaching points so stay tuned...
