Shish Taouk (Garlic-Lemon Chicken Skewers)

Name: Shish Taouk (Garlic-Lemon Chicken Skewers)
Total time: 12 h 30 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Levantine
Ingredients: 800 g Boneless chicken thighs; 120 g Plain yogurt; 6 Garlic cloves; 60 ml Lemon juice; 1 tbsp Tomato paste; 45 ml Olive oil; 1 tsp Ground allspice; 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon; 1 tsp Paprika; 1 1/2 tsp Salt; 1/2 tsp Black pepper; to serve Garlic sauce (toum) or pickles

Chicken thigh left overnight in yogurt, lemon and a great deal of garlic, then grilled hard and fast — the marinade tenderizes where lemon alone would toughen.

Fonte

Ricetta di Lebanese home kitchens · 🏺 Tradizionale · Lebanese household cooking

Lebanese / Levantine home cooking — A marinated chicken shish kebab that Wikipedia records as belonging to Turkish, Armenian and Arab cuisine alike, and which has become part of the broader Middle Eastern and Caucasian repertoire; it is served in kebab houses across the region. It is filed here under Lebanon because the yogurt-garlic-lemon 'taouk' treatment below is the Lebanese one, but the dish is genuinely shared and no country owns it.

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Imran.Family Kitchen Food Fusion

⏱ 750 min🍽 4 porzioni🔥 340 kcal🇱🇧 Libano🌶️

HalalSenza glutineSenza frutta a guscio

Passaggi

Cut the chicken thighs into even 4 cm pieces, trimming any hard fat.
Keep the pieces the same size, even if it means cutting some awkwardly.
💡 Mixed sizes on one skewer means small pieces dry out while big ones stay pink. Uniformity matters more than tidiness here.
Crush the garlic to a smooth paste with a pinch of the salt.
In a bowl, whisk together the yogurt, garlic paste, lemon juice, tomato paste, olive oil, allspice, cinnamon, paprika, salt and pepper.
Taste the marinade. It should be sharp, salty and unmistakably garlicky.
💡 Season the marinade properly now — you cannot salt chicken once it is on a skewer, and a bland marinade produces bland taouk no matter how well you grill it.
Add the chicken and turn it until every piece is coated.
Cover and refrigerate overnight — 12 hours is ideal, 4 is the minimum.
💡 The yogurt is doing the work: its gentle acidity and calcium tenderize the meat slowly, where a lemon-only marinade would 'cook' the surface and turn it chalky by morning. This is why taouk can marinate overnight and ceviche cannot.
If using wooden skewers, soak them in water for 30 minutes.
Thread the chicken onto skewers, pushing the pieces close but not squashed together.
Wipe off the excess marinade clinging to the outside of the meat.
💡 Thick yogurt burns to black bitter flecks before the chicken is done. You want the marinade in the meat, not sitting on it.
Heat a barbecue, griddle or grill pan until it is properly hot — a drop of water should skitter and vanish.
Grill the skewers 5–7 minutes per side, turning once, until charred in patches and just firm.
💡 Turn once, not constantly. Every flip interrupts the crust that is forming — the black patches are flavour, and chicken thigh is forgiving enough to let you wait for them.
Check one piece: cut into the thickest chunk — the juices should run clear with no pink at the bone-side.
💡 Thigh at 75°C is still juicy, unlike breast — do not pull it early out of fear. Undercooked chicken is a real risk; dry taouk is just a disappointment.
Rest the skewers 3 minutes, then serve with warm pita, toum and pickles.

💡 Consigli

Beginner's mistake: using chicken breast because it seems healthier. Breast has no fat to protect it and goes from raw to sawdust in about 90 seconds over a real fire. Thigh is what taouk is made of.
No yogurt? Use 120 g of any thick plain yogurt substitute, or swap in 2 tbsp more olive oil and cut the marinating time to 2 hours — without the yogurt's buffering, a long lemon soak will turn the surface of the chicken pale and mealy.
Six cloves of garlic is not a lot for this dish. If you want the full Lebanese effect, serve it with toum — the whipped garlic-and-oil emulsion that turns up next to every rotisserie taouk in Beirut.
The 750-minute total is almost entirely the overnight marinade. Hands-on time is about 40 minutes — start it the night before and this is a weeknight dinner.