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- Get hungry because I'm about to show you how to make traditional Lebanese-style chicken shawarma. This is such an easy recipe. It mimics the traditional recipe of having chicken shawarma on a spit, but it's so much easier to make it home with just a few spices, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and a nice oven. This is a great recipe to make anytime of the year and my family goes crazy over it. So let's dive in and I'll show you how to make this chicken shawarma recipe. So the most important part of making chicken shawarma is making sure to marinate the chicken
at least one hour before or preferably 24 hours before. So you see here, I've got lots of different spices, some lemons, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil. We're gonna go ahead and mix everything together, add the chicken to it, and then marinate it. We'll start with a fourth of a cup of olive oil and then we'll need two tablespoons of lemon juice. Usually, it's about one lemon. These don't look that juicy, so I might go ahead and just add a lemon and a half. Plus, I like my chicken shawarma to be extra lemony.
Now we'll add six cloves of garlic. You heard that right. The garlic is really important in the chicken shawarma marinade, that's gonna give it so much flavor. So make sure to use fresh garlic if possible. You can mince the garlic or I like to just use a garlic press like this to make it easier. And now for the seasoning. So you'll need salt, cardamom, cumin, paprika, cinnamon, and crushed red pepper. And we're just gonna whisk it all together. Look how gorgeous that is, it smells so good and I just love how beautiful the color is. Now, all we have to do is add the chicken to it. So I have here some chicken thighs.
There's about two and a half pounds of chicken thighs right here. What I recommend is using one pound of chicken thighs and one pound of chicken breast. But if you don't have one or the other, you can totally just use both of them. The chicken thighs just makes it more juicy and more tender and the chicken breast just helps to balance it out so that it's not too fatty, but chicken thighs only works perfectly fine. I am gonna go ahead and just cut these in half though because they are somewhat big and then we'll just drop them right into the marinade.
Okay, and we're just gonna mix all of this together to make sure the marinade gets all over that chicken. So, as I mentioned earlier, the marinade process is really important. If you can, marinate this for 24 hours or overnight. If you don't have a lotta time, you can just marinate it for one hour. If it's only going to be marinated for one hour, you can leave it at room temperature, otherwise, pop it in the fridge. After we've let the chicken marinade, it's time to go ahead and bake it in the oven. So, traditionally the way shawarma is made is on a spit. So it's literally like this large stick and a lot of meat is piled on top of it and then shaved. Because it's really hard to mimic that at home, what I like to do is I like to bake the shawarma first,
take it out of the oven, then slice it up and then sear it on a cast iron skillet. So, I feel like that gets it to be the closest as possible to a restaurant-style chicken shawarma. So the first step to do that is to go ahead and bake this in the oven. And you can see, we've got nice, thick pieces of the chicken thighs that we just cut in half earlier. So go ahead and use a rimmed baking sheet and for easy cleanup, I like to use parchment paper. You don't have to use the parchment paper. And there is a little bit of fat on this chicken thighs, but that's just gonna make it so flavorful and so juicy.
You can definitely cut that off if you wanted to after it's marinated, but I just leave it on and then I let it cook off in the oven. All right, we're gonna pop this in the oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, flipping it halfway through. It looks so juicy and flavorful. What I like to do at this point though is I like to actually slice it and sear it on the cast iron skillet as I mentioned before. That really gives you more of that charred taste to shawarma. And there is no need to add oil to the skillet.
I'm just gonna use some of the juices from here. And because we've got over two pounds of chicken in this recipe, we're gonna cook them in batches so they don't get overcrowded in the skillet. This way, they're not steaming in the skillet, but they're getting nice and seared. All right, I'm gonna remove the first batch and set it aside on this platter. And I've just got some pickles, tomatoes, and parsley here so we can make some nice shawarma sandwiches. All right, here's the final product. This is one of my favorite recipes ever.
I love ordering this when I go to Lebanese restaurants, but it's actually really easy to make it home. It all comes down to the marinade and then searing it just perfectly on that cast iron skillet. So you can have this by itself. You can also throw it on top of salads, put it in sandwiches, and even make like pitta pizzas with them, which is what I like to do as well. Here's one way I like to make a sandwich. So I'll take some of the chicken right here, add a couple slices of tomatoes, and a couple slices of Arabic-style pickles, and then a drizzle of this homemade Lebanese-style tahini sauce.
You can also use garlic sauce as well, which is very popular in a chicken shawarma recipe. So then we're going to just roll it, tuck it in, tuck in the sides, it's gonna be a nice beefy sandwich. All right, I've got it right here. I'm gonna go ahead and take a bite of this beauty. Mm. This chicken shawarma recipe is so good. It's tender, it's juicy, it's flavorful, and it goes so well with the pita bread, the veggies, and the tahini sauce. I hope you guys try the recipe and love it. If you enjoyed this video, please go ahead and share it with friends and family
and I'll see you guys next time.
