What is shawarma - everyone knows. It is sold in any city at almost every step. This fast food, consisting of tortillas with meat, salad, spices and sauce, is one of the most popular in the world, and few people think about its origin. In fact, shawarma is a Middle Eastern dish. It is really prepared from pita bread or pita, lamb, chicken, sometimes veal, fresh vegetables, various seasonings and sauce. They eat shawarma without using cutlery.
In Russian cities they usually sell a Europeanized version of this dish. But what if you cook a real Arabian shawarma?
Cooking technology
The meat for shawarma is fried on a special grill. It is strung on a vertical skewer, which constantly rotates around its axis. Along the spit, heating elements are installed. As the meat is roasted, it is cut with long knives. Cut pieces, which should be thin, immediately fall into a special pan. Then they are crushed. You can see how Arab shawarma is prepared, in the photo below.
In addition to meat, vegetables (usually tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage) and sauces (white garlic, red tomato, kefir) are included in the filling.
Classic recipe for arabic shawarma
To prepare it, you will need the following products:
- low-fat mutton or chicken fillet - 0.8 kg;
- pita cake
- vinegar 5% - 230 ml;
- cinnamon, grated nutmeg, paprika - 1 teaspoon each;
- garlic - 4 large cloves (the result should be a tablespoon of crushed);
- cardamom - a pinch;
- vegetable oil;
- salt.
Sauce Ingredients:
- sour cream - 1 glass;
- garlic - 3 cloves;
- green onions - a quarter cup chopped;
- curry - a pinch;
- pickled cucumber - 1 piece.
Vegetables for toppings:
- fresh cucumbers;
- fresh tomatoes.
Order of preparation:
- Prepare the marinade: mix vinegar, nutmeg, cinnamon, paprika, garlic, cardamom.
- Cut the meat into thin steaks and place in the marinade overnight.
- The next morning, get the steaks from the marinade, dry, then fry in vegetable oil over high heat. It is necessary to fry until incomplete, until a crust appears.
- Cool the meat and cut into strips. Put in a dish of refractory material, cover with foil and send for 20 minutes to the oven, preheated to 180 degrees.
- After 20 minutes, open the oven, remove the foil from the dishes and hold the meat there for another 10 minutes.
Sauce making:
- Finely chop the pickled cucumber.
- Pour crushed garlic, chopped cucumber and chopped green onions into sour cream, add curry and let it brew for 25 minutes.
- Cut the pita, cut the fresh cucumber and tomato into slices and put in a tortilla, meat on them, on top - sour cream sauce.
Palestinian shawarma
Arab shawarma is prepared differently in different regions of the Middle East. This option will require the following set of products:
- chicken meat - 0.4 kg;
- tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, onions - 150 g;
- sour cream (fat content 15%) - 400 g;
- kefir - 100 ml;
- mayonnaise - 100 g;
- dill - 1 branch;
- garlic - 20 cloves;
- lemon - 1 piece;
- pita - 2 pieces;
- olive oil;
- red and black pepper;
- ground nutmeg;
- ground cardamom;
- some hot wasabi sauce (tabasco);
- grape vinegar.
Order of preparation:
- Cut the chicken into small pieces, pour red and black pepper, ground cardamom and nutmeg into the meat, add wasabi, a little vinegar and a little olive oil, 10 cloves of crushed garlic, salt and mix well. Cover the contents with a plate and place the load. Leave under oppression for half an hour.
- Cut the onions into small squares, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers - into small cubes, mix, salt and pepper. If desired, you can pour a little vinegar and leave a little pickle. Fried zucchini and eggplant are sometimes added to vegetables.
- Now you need to make the sauce. First, pour kefir into a suitable container, then add mayonnaise little by little, while stirring constantly. Next, put the remaining 10 cloves of crushed garlic, chopped dill and squeeze the juice of one lemon. All this should be mixed.
- Remove the meat from the marinade, put in a pan and pour sour cream so that the meat is completely covered. Simmer over low heat until partially boiled away sour cream and gaining a dense consistency. Then mix the contents of the pan, make a strong fire and cook with constant stirring, avoiding burning.
- When the meat is cooked to a red tint, remove the pan from the stove, mix it with vegetables and pour the sauce. Wrap the resulting mass in pita while it is hot.
Serve the finished dish in a warm form for beer.
About sauces
As for the preparation of Arab shawarma, each cook has his own so-called chips. And often this applies to branded sauces. Professionals have a special relationship with them. It is believed that the sauce is the most difficult in shawarma and quite a lot of time is spent on it.
There are recipes with fresh tomatoes, bell peppers, olive oil, sugar, salt, oregano and basil.
Another Arab shawarma sauce - spicy - includes fresh tomatoes, which are used to make pasta, fresh hot chili peppers and seven seasonings: young basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, cilantro, pepper, cumin. Tomato paste is mixed with the rest of the ingredients and cooked until boiling.
About meat
As for meat for Arab shawarma, there are subtleties. The fact is that for this dish you can’t take the topmost layer of meat, which is fried on a vertical grill. This layer is removed, and the next one, under it, is already used for cooking. Also, you can not put meat in contact with a skewer in a real shawarma. It is cut off with a very thin layer, strictly along the entire length from top to bottom, then cut into smaller pieces. Before stringing meat on a spit, it is pickled all night.
When all the ingredients: meat, sauces, filling - are wrapped in pita bread, the shawarma is sent to the grill for 1 minute. Only after that the dish is ready.
Conclusion
Arab shawarma is quite possible to cook at home with fresh natural ingredients. Many pickle homemade pickles for the winter, so they are most often at hand. Mayonnaise can not be included, but if you can’t do without it, then it’s better to make your own, it is advisable to bake the cake yourself - this will not take much time.