AI photoChicken Shawarma
A homemade chicken shawarma with warm spices, fresh salad and a sriracha crème fraîche dip, served wrap-style at the table.
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Ingredients
- 600 g Chicken breast cut into strips
- 200 ml Buttermilk
- 4 clove Garlic finely chopped
- 1 tsp Ground coriander
- 1 tsp Cardamom
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- 1 tsp Paprika
- 1 tsp Smoked paprika
- 1 tsp Cumin
- ½ tsp Cayenne pepper
- 1 pcs Lime juiced
- 1 tbsp Olive oil for frying
- Salt
- Black pepper
- 8 pcs Tortilla wraps
- 1 pcs Red onion sliced into rings
- 125 g Salad mix
- ½ pcs Cucumber sliced
- 2 pcs Tomato sliced
- 1 bunch Fresh coriander
- 100 ml Crème fraîche 18%
- 1 tbsp Sriracha
- 1 pcs Lime for serving
Steps
Mix the marinade well in a bowl and coat the chicken strips in it.
Cover the bowl and leave the meat to marinate in the fridge overnight.
Place the chicken with the marinade into a greased ovenproof dish and bake in a preheated oven for 25 minutes at 175°C (fan).
Remove the chicken from the oven, drain off any excess liquid and shred the tender meat with two forks.
Mix the crème fraîche with coriander and sriracha into a smooth dip, then serve the tortillas, chicken and all the toppings in separate bowls so everyone can build their own shawarma at the table.
Forget the vertical spit for a second — that's what gives shawarma its name and its romance, the meat shaved off a slow-turning column, but what's actually happening there is just a long, gentle cook in its own fat and juices, basted by gravity. You can't rebuild a spit in a flat, and you don't need to. Buttermilk and an oven dish do the same job: the acid in the buttermilk relaxes the muscle fibres in the chicken breast, which is a lean, dry cut with almost nothing to protect it from overcooking, and the dish holds the marinade around the meat instead of letting it run off the way it would on an open spit.
What decides whether this works isn't the spice list — coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, two paprikas, cumin, cayenne, that's just "warm and a bit smoky," and you can lean the mix any direction you like without ruining anything — it's the marinating time and the resting after baking. Overnight isn't a suggestion, it's the buttermilk actually doing chemistry: tenderising breast meat from the surface inward takes hours, not the twenty minutes people give it when they're in a hurry. Skip that and you've basically just seasoned the outside of a dry chicken breast.
Chicken breast is the honest choice here, not the traditional one — proper shawarma in Beirut or Istanbul is usually thigh and leg meat stacked with fat layers between them, because fat is what keeps a vertical spit juicy over hours of slow turning. Breast has none of that insurance, which is exactly why the buttermilk marinade and the overnight wait aren't optional extras, they're the whole mechanism standing in for the fat you don't have. If you only have thigh meat, use it — you can marinate it for less time and it'll forgive you more.
Buttermilk itself is doing a specific job: it's mild enough in acidity that it tenderises without turning the meat mushy or "cooking" it the way a harsh lime or vinegar marinade can on the surface. If you don't have buttermilk, thin natural yoghurt with a splash of milk gets you close — same mild acid, same proteins helping the spices cling to the meat rather than sliding off.
The spice mix is built in two halves that do different things. Coriander, cumin, cinnamon and cardamom are the warm, slightly sweet backbone — the "this smells like a kebab shop" smell — while paprika, smoked paprika and cayenne are colour and heat, with the smoked paprika doing the job the open flame and charring fat would do on a real spit. You genuinely can't go far wrong adjusting ratios here; what you can't skip is salt in the marinade itself, not just at the table, because salt also helps the meat hold moisture through the bake, same mechanism as a wet brine.
Red onion, cucumber, tomato and fresh coriander are freshness and crunch against soft meat and soft wrap — swap tomato for nothing much, it's a filler more than a flavour, but the raw onion rings matter: they're sharp where everything else is rounded and warm. If raw red onion is too much for you, a quick five-minute soak in the lime juice you're using for the dip softens the bite without losing the crunch.
The crème fraîche-sriracha dip is your fat-and-heat answer to the absence of garlic sauce or toum, which takes proper patience and an emulsion that collapses if you rush it — not a fair ask on a weeknight. Crème fraîche already carries enough richness that you don't need to build an emulsion from oil and garlic; you're borrowing the texture, not the technique. Any soured cream-type product with enough body to hold its shape on a spoon works the same way — thinned yoghurt won't, it'll just run off the wrap.
Tortillas, lastly, are a straightforward substitution for flatbread — any soft wrap with a good gluten structure will hold the filling without splitting, which is really the only test for "right bread" here, nothing more mystical than that.