Authentic Chicken Shawarma Recipe & 2003 Chateau Musar Wine Pairing

Chicken shawarma and a Lebanese white wine. Let's go. So if you haven't had chicken shawarma, I'm sure you've seen it somewhere. It's a popular Middle Eastern dish of marinated chicken that's typically cooked on a vertical rotisserie. And it's usually cooked with heat from the side and it's usually spinning. As I said, it's rotisserie. I don't have a rotisserie. I'm going to somewhat replicate that. I do have a pan with these that allows me to place these pins or these actually spits in the pan and to stack my chicken on it and cook it in the oven. Now I won't have the rotisserie effect, but I will have the nice stacking. I should get nice, juicy, succulent chicken from this. All right. These pans are super inexpensive. If you don't have a pan like this, or if you can't get a pan like this, you can take an onion, cut the bottom off the onion, make it flat, get you a wooden skewer, sit that flat part of the onion in the pan, put the skewer in the top and stack your chicken right on top. Same thing. But these pans, I want you to, again, to think out of the box a little bit. These pans are not expensive. Let's be adventurous. So in my chicken shawarma making process, the first thing I need to do is I need to get my chicken marinated because this chicken is going to sit in the refrigerator overnight, but I need to make sure that these chicken thighs, and that's what I'm using. I'm using chicken thighs. I need to make sure that they are all evenly flat. I've got my plastic bags here. I've got my meat mallet and I'm going to get my chicken thighs in these bags and I want to make sure that they're all even. I don't want to go too thin. I just want to make sure that I go just far enough to make sure that they're all even. All right. So I've got them all pounded out evenly. That's going to ensure that we get nice, even cooking. Now for my spice mixture. So I've got ground ginger. I've got turmeric, cumin, smoked paprika, coriander, cardamom, and cayenne pepper. So to my chicken thighs, I'm going to add extra virgin olive oil. Got a little bit of water, garlic, my spice mixture, salt, fresh cracked black pepper. I've got a lemon here and I want to get the zest off of this lemon and out of that same lemon, I'm going to get the juice. Okay. So I want to get this massaged in I'm going to make sure that we get nice, even distribution of those spices. All right. So I'm going to get this into a Ziploc bag. I'm going to stick it in the refrigerator and we're going to allow it to sit overnight. My chicken thighs have been marinating overnight. I'm ready to get them on the spit and into the oven. So this just screws in there and I'm going to start stacking my thighs on there. I've got my oven set to 350 degrees. This is going to take at least about an hour and a half or so, maybe a little more. I've got my probe thermometer and I've got this set to 165 degrees. So I want the internal temperature of this to be 165 degrees. So I'm just going to go right down into the middle of this and I'm going to sit this in the oven and we were looking for again, 165 degrees internal temperature. I'm going to make a garlic tomb sauce to put on my, my chicken shawarma. What you want to do first is you want to make sure that your garlic cloves are split in half and you remove the germ from the inside. And it's the little green piece. You see there a little tiny green piece and you want to remove that from the garlic, from each head of garlic or each clove of garlic. I'm sorry. Little piece in the middle there. It's the germ that comes out and that's what I've done to all of these. I've gone ahead and removed the germ from each one and the germ in this garlic. The reason why we're doing that is because the germ creates unnecessary bitterness. Sometimes it makes the garlic or the sauce that you make with the garlic a little too strong. So we want to pull that out. So the garlic goes into my food processor with salt. I'm going to post this. We want to get, get the garlic mixed up. We're going to scrape the sides down and I'm going to add a tablespoon of my lemon juice. Close it again. Scrape down the sides. And this time we're going to process this until we get a nice paste. So with the food processor running, I'm going to drizzle in about a quarter cup of my oil. I'm using a neutral oil. I'm using vegetable oil. Okay. Looks really nice. Super fluffy. That is delicious. So garlicky. Nice punch of lemon, the salt, perfect amount of salt. That's good. To pair with my chicken shawarma, I've chosen a 2003 Chateau Moussar. This is a Lebanese white blend. It consists of two ancient grapes, Obadiah and Marois. Again, this is a white wine and it's deliberately been oxidized. Oxidation can be beneficial in enhancing the flavor, reducing tannins and increasing ageability. And it can also change the color of the wine, as you can see. Yeah, again, it's a white wine, believe it or not. 2003. So we've got a few years on it. So 21 years, and this wine has taken on a tremendous amount of color, obviously. And the nose initially is a, it's like a fortified wine. It's like, like sherry. Smells thick, smells heavy, if heavy or thick as a smell. Wow. It just smells really rich. Give it a taste. Medium bodied on the palate. And initially, the first thing I get is that fortified thing that I was talking about. It's really short lived. It's sort of like you think you're getting something like sherry or something leaning in that direction, but it immediately gives way to dry fruit. Really a nice middle of the road, a perfect acidity. And it's dry, not sweet. But the finish is, it's sort of a sweet finish, not a heavy sweet, but sort of like a flavored water, like water with just a hint of, not a sweetened water, just a little fruit flavor. I get a little sweetness, it leaves sweetness like that on my palate, like caramel almost. Really nutty. This is my first experience with a Lebanese wine. And obviously my dish is a Middle Eastern dish, arguably a Lebanese dish. I'm excited about the parent. So we want to wrap up the end of our wrap so that everything doesn't fall out of it. Aluminum foil works. That'll hold it together. I'm ready to taste. Pour some wine here and dig right into this shawarma wrap. So full of flavor. Marinating those chicken thighs overnight. That's the way to go. Huge, huge. If this is even a term, huge flavor. Also, I want to point out that in cooking this, it's not absolutely necessary that you have a probe thermometer. I mean, you could open your oven and check it with an instant read thermometer, but you would be benefited hugely if you had a probe thermometer. A couple of things. It's going to allow you to get a precise read on your temperature exactly when it's where you want it to be. The other thing is, is it helps you to keep from opening the oven. You open the oven and you just extend your cooking time. This is a four pound recipe. There's four pounds of chicken thighs in this recipe, and this took about two and a half hours to cook. Now, if you open the oven a couple of times, you figure that goes to about three and a half, four hours. Instant read, or I'm sorry, the probe thermometer in the chicken thighs, keep the oven closed and you're able to cook it stress-free until it's ready, until it's where you want it to be, 165 degrees. This is absolutely delicious. It goes perfectly with fries. Now, let's see if it pairs. The garlic tune, the feta. We've got a lot of flavor going on all of those spices that went into the chicken. Oh wow. So this is a Lebanese white wine, and this is arguably a Lebanese dish, depending upon who you ask. Pairing fantastically. I'm loving this, but I got to double check. Wow. That is a perfect pairing. I'm Chef Glenn B, and as always eat well.