Middle Eastern · Main
Oven Chicken Shawarma
- Easy
- 60 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, char used as punctuation, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 800g chicken thighs
- Marinade: 4 tbsp olive oil, lemon, 6 garlic cloves, 2 tsp each cumin and paprika, 1 tsp turmeric, ½ tsp cinnamon, pinch allspice
- 1 red onion, wedges
- Pita, tahini or garlic sauce (toum), pickles
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenThe broiler: heat from aboveMarinating: acid, salt and timeResting meat & slicing against the grain
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Marinate 1–24 h. 600 min
- Roast at 220°C with the onions, 30–35 min, until charred at the edges. 35 min
- Rest, slice thin, then crisp the slices in the pan juices under the broiler 3 min. 3 min
- Pile into pita with sauce and pickles.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes
- The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
- The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
- Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
- The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
- What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.
Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chianti or Barbera
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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