Chicken Shawarma Recipe: How to Make Shawarma at Home

Chicken Shawarma Recipe

Chicken Shawarma is a popular gourmet sandwich that you can get at Middle Eastern restaurants. Marinated chicken chunks are mounted on a large rotating skewer and then roasted slowly to perfection against a gas-burning grill. Due to the unavailability of such industrial roasters at home, Chicken Shawarma has typically remained a restaurant dish. However, we’ve learned a few tricks that can bring you the beautiful flavor of the Chicken Shawarma Recipe at home without the need of such roasters.

Chicken Shawarma Skewers in Tripoli, Lebanon

We’ve experimented with at least 3 recipes; 2 of them tasted good but were closer to “Shish Tawook” (another chicken dish) than they were to Chicken Shawarma. So what we’re going to feature here is our third recipe which was adopted from a family friend who was once a Chef at a Lebanese Restaurant in Michigan.

Nice Marination of Chicken Shawarma

The basic concept in our recipe is to have a nice marination that mimics a good chicken shawarma flavor and then grill the chicken in such a way that keeps it juicy. We’ve found that our friend’s advice of using a panini or George Foreman grill is the best as it cooks fast and it keeps the chicken moist. Do not overcook the chicken, we’ve found that 13-15 minutes on medium heat was plenty, especially that we we were cooking thin slices of chicken.

The Chicken Shawarma Sandwich

Once the chicken shawarma is grilled, place the chicken breasts on a cutting board and shred into thin slices as per the photo above. Spread those slices along the diameter of a pita bread, add a bit of Lebanese Garlic Paste (check recipe) , some salty cucumber pickles, a bit of roasted tomatoes, french fries, roll it and voila.. you’ve got yourself a nice chicken shawarma sandwich, made at home! The image below is of our Chicken Shish Tawook sandwich just for illustration purposes, so you can see the chicken pieces are similar to kabobs where as in the Shawarma they’re shredded.