Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma recipe

I love my shawarma sandwich, but to make it the traditional way is way too much work. But I've figured out a way, a nice shortcut that'll get you there. I've got an oven-roasted chicken shawarma. Let's get cooking with style. The first step in making this chicken shawarma is putting together the marinade. And it's a lot of ingredients, but it's well worth it. We've got some lemon, parsley, garlic, chili peppers, turmeric. We've got paprika, also some cumin, salt, and pepper. And we're just going to put this all in a bowl here. And then we're just going to mix it all up with some olive oil and a little bit of lemon juice. You got your olive oil there. Make sure you get it all in there. And then there's your lemon juice and those zest of lemons that comes from the lemon juice. So make sure you utilize it that way. Give this a good solid mix and combine all the ingredients. And I'm telling you, the fragrance from this is unbelievable. Now we're going to be using chicken thighs. And for that, I want you to do something for me. I want you to leave this fat on there. The fat is really, really good and adds a lot to it. There's your red onions. And those are going to be part of the roasting. And then to that, we're going to put in our marinade. And the reason we're doing this up front, obviously, is because you want it to soak. But this really needs to sit in there for at least an hour. Now we're going to toss this all in. And then throughout the next hour or two, we'll come back and mix this all up. While the chicken marinades, let's put together the white sauce. We've got some whole plain yogurt. And I like to use the creamy, not the Greek style. I like Greek style. But for this, since we're making a sauce, I like it a little bit creamy. We're going to put some mayonnaise in. And this is about a two to one ratio, mayo to the yogurt. And then zest a lemon again. And then we've got a little bit of mint there. And that mint will just kind of accentuate the nice spiciness of the shawarma marinade. We'll put that in. That's your lemon juice. And we want to make sure that this gets mixed really well. And you want to do this in advance, too, because you want that mint to get mixed in with the flavor of the lemon and the lemon juice. So we'll get that all mixed up and put this in the fridge so those flavors can come together. And then we'll pop that chicken on our baking sheet and get it into the oven. So the chicken is totally marinated. It's been in there for about two or three hours. We're going to put it on the roasting pan. But you got to make sure that you oil this up just a little bit. I've got my little sprayer here. But if you do it by hand, you get your fingers in there. But give it a nice, good coating because you got a lot of things that are going to make this stick. So we're just going to set this down. Get our chicken in there. And we're going to take all of that beautiful marinade that's in there and get it onto the pan along with our onions. And this is just going to go in the oven. Now, I want you to make sure that you spread your chicken out so we can get some little crispy edges. And try to separate the chicken so it's apart from everything else. And move those onions around. Now, I've got my oven preheated 425, 450-ish. We're going to go pop this in the oven. We're going to get this in the oven for about 20, 25 minutes. Middle rack. We'll check it in about 15 minutes. All right, this is nice and ready to go. We've got the crispy little edges on there. The onions are cooked all the way through. What we're going to do, we'll put one of these together for you. Let's grab a nice big fat one. Some onions. Throw it up on there. And what we're going to do is we're just going to chop this up. Just like if it was at a shawarma shop. Look at how beautiful that looks. Just take that. Then come back across like so. You feel like you're at a shawarma stand, right? Get our plate up here. Got our pita. Just like your buns for your burgers, you want to toast your pita bread. Get that chicken right in there like so. Get plenty of those onions. We're going to take a nice dollop of that sauce. Put it over the top. Some of the Roma tomatoes. And then of course, now I want you to use the Persian or English cucumbers. Because the North American cucumbers, they're just a little too soggy. I'm going to put this down. It's probably going to fall apart, but you get the idea. I mean, look at how beautiful that looks. You can put this out like family style and everyone just have at it. I suggest that's what you do. But if you'd like this recipe for oven roasted chicken shawarma, you can go to CBS8.com. I know you're going to love this one. Enjoy.