Bear Flag Blog

I love Chicken Shawarma, but my attempts to make it (or something like it) at home have heretofore been tasty failures. Good, but not fantastic, nor really what I was aiming for.

What I'm trying to recapture is the fantastically delicious flavor of the Chicken Shawarma I used to get from Habibi's restaurant in the Durant food court adjacent to UC Berkeley. This was more than fifteen years ago, and Habibi's is long gone, but the rose-tinged glow of his Shawarma lives on in my memory. So I continue to experiment.

Anyway, I came the closest yet on Monday, and I shall share the delicious recipe with you! It's also cheap and quick - such a bargain!

First, I grilled a couple of flattened skinless chicken breasts. My butcher will flatten them for me with the side of his heavy cleaver, but of course you can use a meat smacker (aka 'tenderizer') at home if yours won't. The flattening lets the chicken cook much quicker - only a few minutes per side - and you get more of the Shawarma-style outer meat with the grilled taste to it, versus the wetter interior meat.

(This is why I call it Shawarma-style chicken. It's not actually chicken from a vertical rotisserie, simply because I'm feeding only three people. I would very much like to cook with a vertical rotisserie, but outside of throwing parties I can't see the sense in it. Fortunately, grilling flattened breasts on my standard grill comes close to the same output.)

While you are cooking the meat, cook some white rice. I like Basmati rice but any rice should work fine.

Then you make the sauce. Ingredients:
1/2 cup tahini. Key here is to not buy the most common store brand, namely Joyva. Joyva tahini tastes fine but is like stiff peanut butter and very hard to mix. Buy a softer brand in a glass or plastic jar - I like Sadaf brand - where the consistency is much more like catsup.
1/3 cup lemon juice. Yes, it's a lot of lemon juice.
2 tablespoons crushed garlic. I buy the jars of pre-crushed garlic, but feel free to dice/smush your own if you like.
1/2 cup olive oil.
1/3 cup water. The water is actually important, it helps smooth the sauce out.
1 teaspoon salt. The salt is also very important, it's not a lot but it is critical for blending the flavors properly.

Feel free to mix the proportions to your taste - as I say it is important to have some salt and some water, but everything else you can add more or less as you see fit. I tend to play fast and loose particularly with the olive oil.

Mix the sauce to uniformity, with a spoon/whisk if you are a real cook or with a blender if you are a little girly cook.

Chop up the meat into small pieces, with a cleaver if you have it and like a bit of fun, or with a kitchen knife if you are like me and fear meat flying all over the kitchen. Aim for Shawarma-size pieces, i.e. bite-size and smaller.

On each plate, lay down a bed of your favorite white rice, pour the chopped meat over it, and then generously drizzle the sauce on top. Viola!

Vegetables are left as an exercise for the reader.