- If you ever wanted
to try making chicken shawarma at home,
then today's video is for you.
Hey, I'm John Kanell
and you're watching "Preppy Kitchen."
Today I'm here with "Cooking with Coit" and we're going
to show you how to make a delicious chicken shawarma.
Let's get started.
Brian and I are really good friends
with Justin and his wife, Catherine.
So while we're in L.A.,
we're visiting them for lunch and I thought it'd be fun
to make a delicious chicken shawarma
in your beautiful kitchen.
- Which is one of my favorite dishes.
I love a chicken shawarma.
- First up,
we're going to be juicing a lemon from my mom's tree.
It's a Kanell lemon.
- Kanell lemon, awesome.
Very cool.
- Slice it in half.
Juice it up.
Everything's going to go into a big bowl
and then we're going to make a really easy marinade
for this chicken.
- Cool.
So with the marinade,
because I haven't made this recipe,
so I'm really following your lead here.
The marinade,
how long does it need to go in the fridge?
I'm sure we'll get to it but is it like one
of those really long times you have to leave it in?
- So here's the deal.
I kind of planned this ahead and cheated a bit.
The marinade time is at least minimum two hours
to overnight.
It's a really good thing to make a day ahead.
So last night I made some ahead of time.
I brought it over and we're going
to have chicken shawarma for everybody.
- Cool, awesome.
Well, you thought ahead, which is so smart.
- [John] Squeeze with all your might.
- I know.
I feel like you have
to have really strong forearms to cook, right?
- Yes, yes.
Justin by the way,
has his own cooking channel.
It's called "Cooking with Coit."
- [Justin] Yep.
- You're kind of like more comfort, clean food.
So it's still delicious,
has like a cleaner, like lighter vibe to it.
- That's right, exactly.
The way we think about it is comfort food done
just a little cleaned up.
- I made a bunch of his recipes.
They're delicious and if you want to check them out,
I'm going to put a link in the description box below
while he juices those lemons.
- [Justin] Still juicing.
- I didn't say to stop.
- Jeez, tough show over here.
My show is a much more friendly.
- Okay, we'll see about that.
All right, that's good.
We're going to add about three tablespoons
of olive oil.
I'm going to measure it as I would have vanilla.
So just get it all out there.
For those of you who don't know,
chicken shawarma is like the Mediterranean version
of a gyro.
Gyro?
A gyro going to be made from the rotisserie lamb
that's put together on a spit.
It's just like cooked, and cooked,
and cooked, and shaved off.
- [Both] So good.
- And then a chicken shawarma
is the chicken version of that.
So it's chicken on the spit,
slow-roasted, all the spices,
but even in beautiful kitchens like this,
do you have a spit?
- No.
I wish I had a spit though.
Should I get one put in?
- I've actually been in a kitchen that had one
and it was like everything.
It was one of the fifties.
- Wow, how cool.
- We're going to be cheating it because at home we want
to cheat this and have the same flavors that we can get.
So it's going to be marinated with all the spices
for a long time and then roasted in the oven.
Because we're not using the spit,
we're using thigh meat.
So really dark,
lots of fat to kind of soak in and give us a ton of flavor.
- Got it.
- Now for the spices.
That was enough of a break.
- [Justin] Perfect.
- One tablespoon of coriander.
Not leveling a tablespoon.
It's not that kind of day.
- No, go for it, live your life.
- What do you want to add in?
- Okay.
So we're going to add in one 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon.
Love cinnamon.
- It's kind of weird if you're not used
to using cinnamon in savory food.
Do you do do that a lot on "Cooking with Coit?"
- I don't do it a lot but I feel like I should.
- Two teaspoons of black pepper.
In you go.
If you're using a pepper grinder,
just grind to taste.
So I'm going to add in the salt right now.
This is fine salt.
So I'm going to add in about 1/2 a teaspoon.
Just like that.
- Okay, perfect.
Next we're going to add in 1/2 a teaspoon of cayenne.
Okay, so next up, we're going to add some cumin.
We're going to do two teaspoons.
Cumin is such a fantastic spice but quite a strong flavor.
So I've overdone it on the cumin before.
- Really?
- Yes.
Next up we're going to do one teaspoon of paprika.
- Now we're going to whisk these spices up right now.
This is a little bit of a paste.
I think that lemon was a little dry.
- Yeah.
- You can have a dry lemon.
Let's cut one more and just add a bit more in,
'cause it should be more of a liquid.
This is like a full, like dry rub almost.
- This, these Kanell lemons are a little,
now quite as juicy as we were hoping they would be.
- Not going to tell my mom that.
- No, jeez.
Don't tell her where I live.
Okay, all right,
I think we're getting some good juice now.
Oh my gosh.
- Moment of truth.
I mean it also splattered all over the place.
This is like a beautiful consistency now.
- [Justin] Great.
- What we're going to do is add in two pounds
of boneless, skinless chicken thighs.
So we're just gonna mix that up and then cover it.
- I kind of want to get my hands in there.
I'm just gonna do it.
I did wash my hands before.
- I just didn't want you
to get like pepper all over your hands.
- You know what?
We're just doing it.
- Okay.
- We're not worried about the lemon juice on the counter.
We're getting our hands in there.
There's something very visceral too
I think about really touching your food,
and that's something that I feel like a lot
of people are missing these days,
is really like being in contact with their food.
- That's so true.
- You know?
Okay.
- [John] That's good.
- What do you think?
- We're going to cover this in plastic right now
and with the magic of a swap-out,
we're going to have a marinated version
that has all those flavors soaking in.
- Cool.
- And he's gonna wash his hands too.
- Yes.
- This is our swap-out.
It's been marinating for like about a day
and in the fridge, of course.
Our oven's set to 425.
Nice and hot.
Now it's time to slice up an onion
that's not from my mom's garden.
- Okay, okay.
I won't offend anyone if I critique this onion.
But it's a beautiful onion.
- This knife is like the fanciest like,
can you see this knife?
It is so, like what is this?
- It's a good one.
- It's like it's jewelry.
Can I try,
I just want to try like.
- Please, yeah, hey.
Be my guest.
- It's sharp.
- I mean probably.
Was it as sharp as yours though or no?
- I thought it was going to be like a laser.
It's a sharp knife but it's so pretty.
- Yeah, thank you.
Thank you yeah, that's really nice.
- So we're going to thinly slice one onion.
It's going to get nice and caramelized
and absorb all the flavors from this marinade.
We don't want to like put the onion in right away
'cause that's going overboard.
Just want to get some that flavor.
- [Justin] Yep.
Are you a big garlic guy too or no?
- Yes, I love garlic so much.
- So I feel like there's more
to talk about with that reaction.
- Ah, me encanta.
- Okay, onion sliced.
- All right, here I have our beautiful marinade.
We're going to give this a toss.
Do you wanna use your tongs or fingers?
- I was going to do fingers again
but I think I'm going to do tongs
so I don't have to go back and wash my hands.
- I tell you what.
I figured out I feel bad
because I use tumeric in a lot of recipes.
It's antiinflammatory and I like it.
But then it stains your fingers.
It's so hard to get out.
So I was like, no, but then.
Whatever you want.
- You know what?
Okay, tongs this time.
- Give it a toss and we're going to dump it out
onto the sheet pan.
It's going to be delicious.
- Great.
Do you think there's anything to,
when you're going at these onions,
to like really being aggressive
and sort of breaking them to let some of the juices out?
Or do you think they're just going
to happen when you're baking anyway?
- I think it's gonna happen when you're baking anyways.
There's also lemon juice in here
so that acid's going to like de-flame the onions a bit,
take some of the bite out.
You could definitely like pop those in a bit early
if you wanted to, though.
- Right, and get 'em kind
of caramelizing a little bit in the pan?
Yeah, okay.
- That looks good.
Let's dump it out.
- Okay, go on.
- There we go.
- Team, team, team work.
- Teamwork makes the dream work.
We're just gonna spread this out onto the baking sheet
so nothing is like overlapping too much.
- This smells amazing already.
- This smells so good.
Thank you.
- [Justin] It's gonna be great.
- 425 for about 30 minutes and if you want,
you can flip these over halfway through
so they get like, you know,
a little bit of heat,
a little bit of moisture.
And also so the onions don't burn.
Onions should be like really crispy on the edge.
- Great, okay.
- Into the oven!
- [Justin] Pop it in.
Here we go.
- While our chicken's in the oven,
we're going to make a really easy
and delicious Greek yogurt sauce.
Do you make these sauces?
- I do.
I love a nice yogurt sauce.
- Love them because they have all my favorite things.
The yogurt, the lemon, garlic.
It's like everything you could want in a nice easy sauce.
- Yep.
- The first step is to get the juice of half a lemon.
Again from my mother's tree.
- Half a Kanell lemon.
- This one is nice and juicy.
- This is a good one.
- Has a lot of seeds though,
so we're not going to have those in there.
- [Justin] All right.
Give this a juice.
- [John] That's good.
- Good, okay.
(laughing)
Literally went up to your glasses.
- It's okay.
- These lemons, these Kanell lemons.
Just can't trust 'em.
- Yeah, it's the lemons.
So then we have three garlic cloves.
You could use two or four,
totally up to you.
Well, no, don't do four.
- [Justin] Four would be a lot, right?
- We're going to microplane these
and this is actually Justin's idea.
Instead of just mincing them,
it really does emulsify all that garlic juice out of there
and it's also easier too.
- Yeah, I feel like I can never mince a clove of garlic
and get it the same consistency as a microplane.
It's just not, it's just, you know.
- That's not good for Virgo feelings.
I see that nothing's coming out
but I know it's getting it's microplaned.
- It's happening, it's happening, it's happening.
- [John] You just have to get it out at the end.
- [Justin] Right, yeah.
I'll just give it a little.
- Nothing is still coming out but I have faith
that it'll work out.
- Or it's magic, you know?
- That could be magic.
- It could be magic.
Okay, I'm going to show everyone.
We were doing something.
- Yeah, see it's all there.
I feel so bad for your fingers today.
All these spices and garlic.
Mine are totally clean.
- Yeah, you know what though?
This is your recipe.
- This is my last visit over.
You can tell, he's like never again.
- That's it.
You and your lemons.
- We added the garlic into the lemon juice
and not the yogurt because this isn't a,
hangout here for a minute
and what happens is it de-flames the garlic.
So the garlic has a crazy bite and it's not cooked,
which is a lot for people to digest.
So we just let it hang out in the lemon juice.
The acid will take some of the bite away
and you will still have that delicious garlic flavor.
- Yeah, can I wash my hands now?
- Sorry.
- Okay, cool.
- 2/3 of a cup of Greek yogurt.
I'm going to eyeball this.
- [Justin] Okay.
- It's my favorite thing to do.
Ooh, I love that.
I love a fresh.
- Yeah.
- A fresh cap because it's all cream on top.
Think I have to add a little bit more.
Just the cream.
I'm going to mix that up now
and then we're going to add salt and pepper to taste.
And I stole this.
Look at this.
Ah, so much pepper.
- You don't realize all the embarrassing things
you have in your house until someone comes over.
- It's not embarrassing it's fricking cool.
- I mean, that's a little embarrassing.
- I was like why am I using this like a sucker
when I could this massive one.
- Would you like some salt?
Some giant salt as well?
- I would like some salt too.
I love pink salt because it's pink.
But it doesn't taste different.
- Yeah.
- Okay, that's good.
Let's give it a little whirl and the little taste.
And if you want,
you can add things like some cumin,
some coriander, even some,
you can make it more of tzatziki
with cucumber, and the herbs, and everything.
- Oh.
- Taste.
- I even do.
So I even do this.
- Why?
- Well because then if you,
you can reuse your tasting spoon.
You know what I mean?
You're going to trust and go back in.
- We both have kids that are roughly the same age.
I think it's like colored the experience.
Like having three to four-year-old little boy at home,
you're just like it's fine.
So how did it taste?
- You know, I didn't even get there.
I didn't even get there.
Let me try again.
It's nice.
Maybe a little more lemon?
- A little more lemon.
Okay, let's do that.
- [Justin] Yeah, okay.
- [John] I love that for us.
- We're there.
- Does this happen on the "Cooking with Coit" channel
when you taste things?
- No, I guess I don't really do that on my channel.
But I don't know.
When you're here I'm just,
this very communal moment.
I just want to be respectful.
- I like it.
I'm just wondering,
I just wanted to catch the vibe.
- No, no.
This is not the vibe of my channel.
- It's like very grounded.
- We may be a little more formal,
but like we're also very casual.
- No, it's good.
- We like to have fun.
- I like having fun too.
This tastes good.
So right now we're going to pop this into the fridge
and then we're going to dress this all up
once it comes out of the oven.
So it will be right back.
- Cool.
- Our chicken baked for about half an hour
and we let it rest for about 20 minutes.
You don't want it to like ooze out.
It needs to capture those juices back.
In the meantime,
we also have some tomatoes, cucumber,
and lettuce all ready to go.
The chicken got a nice thin chop.
- [Justin] Yeah, cool.
- We both like pita pockets.
These have perforations so we can't do that.
We're going to fold them up.
Generous dollop of that sauce on the bottom.
- Thank you.
- And then load it up with the chicken,
lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes.
Before we take a bite,
if you like this video,
hit that like button and subscribe,
and don't forget to check out
Justin's channel here on YouTube,
"Cooking with Coit."
Mm.
- Mm.
These are so good.
- Amazing.
See you in the next video.