Shish Taouk.
Lebanese Garlic-Yogurt Chicken Skewers
شيش طاووق · Shish tawuq · say it: sheesh tah-OOK
Shish taouk is grilled chicken with a tenderiser doing quiet work in the background. Cubes of thigh sit for a night in yogurt sharpened with lemon, crushed garlic, a spoon of tomato paste and warm spice; the acid and the enzymes loosen the meat while the yogurt clings and, over fire, dries into a thin savoury crust. What you taste is smoke and garlic first, then lemon, then a faint sweet-warm note of cinnamon behind it. It is fast food in Lebanon — a skewer pulled into flatbread with toum, pickles and chips — and it is genuinely easy to make well at home, provided you do not skip the marinade time.
- Gate
- LebanonBeirut
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total time
- 4 hr 40 min incl. 4 hr rest
- Serves
- 4
- Status
- Easy
- Nutrition / serving · estimated
- Calories 520 kcal
- Protein 44 g
- Carbs 7 g
- Fat 34 g
- Fiber 1 g
- Sodium 980 mg
Why this recipe works.
- Thighs, not breast — the cut that survives fierce heat and stays juicy when the outside is properly charred.
- A yogurt marinade with the right acid balance: enough lemon to season, not so much that the meat turns chalky.
- Includes real toum with the emulsion troubleshooting, because a broken garlic sauce is the usual failure point.
- Written for a grill pan and an oven grill as well as charcoal, with honest notes on what you lose without live fire.
Ingredients.
15 itemsFor the chicken
For the marinade
For the toum
Equipment
- Metal or soaked wooden skewers
- Charcoal grill, grill pan or oven grill
- Food processor or mortar (for the toum)
Instructions.
Marinate the chicken
Whisk the yogurt, lemon juice, garlic paste, olive oil, tomato paste, paprika, cinnamon, salt and pepper in a bowl until smooth and evenly pink-orange. Add 800 g of chicken cubes, turn until every piece is coated, cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.
Start the toum
Blitz the peeled garlic with the salt in a food processor, scraping down twice, until it is a fine, wet paste with no visible chunks. Chunks of garlic are what break the emulsion later.
Build the emulsion
With the motor running, add the neutral oil in a thread so thin it is almost drops, alternating with a teaspoon of lemon juice every 60 ml or so. After the first 100 ml the mixture will pale and thicken like mayonnaise — only then increase the flow. Finish with the ice water to lighten it and refrigerate.
Tip Cold ingredients hold better. If the kitchen is warm, chill the oil and the processor bowl first.
Skewer the chicken
Thread the cubes onto skewers, five or six per skewer, scraping off thick blobs of marinade as you go and leaving a few millimetres between pieces. Let them sit at room temperature for 20 minutes so they do not hit the grill fridge-cold.
Grill hard
Grill over hot charcoal or in a smoking grill pan for 10–14 minutes, turning every 3 minutes, until the edges are blackened in places, the surface is dry and burnished rather than wet, and the juices run clear. A thermometer in the largest cube should read 74°C.
Tip Resist turning the skewers too often at the start — the chicken needs an uninterrupted few minutes on each face to build colour.
Rest and serve
Slide the skewers onto a warm platter, squeeze over a little lemon and rest for 5 minutes so the juices settle. Serve with a generous heap of toum, warm flatbread and pickles, and let people build their own rolls.
Tips from our kitchen.
- Marinate at least 4 hours, ideally overnight. Under 2 hours and the yogurt has not penetrated; over 24 and the surface goes soft and pasty.
- Cut the thighs into 4 cm cubes. Smaller pieces dry out before they colour; larger ones char outside while the middle stays pink.
- Scrape off excess marinade before the chicken hits the heat. Thick yogurt burns black instead of browning.
- Leave a hair of space between cubes on the skewer so the heat circulates. Packed skewers steam themselves and never colour.
- For toum, add the oil in a thin thread at the start — the first 100 ml decides whether the emulsion holds. Speed up only once it thickens.
- Soak wooden skewers 30 minutes, or use metal ones; unsoaked wood burns through and dumps the chicken into the fire.
Substitutions.
- Chicken thighs → Chicken breast, cut into 4 cm cubes
- Breast works but is far less forgiving. Cut the grilling time by about a third and pull it off the moment the outside colours.
- Toum → Garlic yogurt sauce: 200 g thick yogurt, 2 crushed garlic cloves, lemon, salt
- Much milder and much easier, and it is what many Lebanese homes serve on a weeknight. It is not toum, and nobody will pretend otherwise.
- Lebanese seven-spice → 1 tsp paprika + ½ tsp cinnamon + ¼ tsp ground allspice + a pinch of nutmeg
- Blends vary by household and by shop. Any warm, sweet-leaning mix works; avoid anything with strong cumin, which pushes the flavour towards kebab.
Variations.
- Shish taouk sandwich
- The street version: a thin markook or pita spread with toum, filled with hot chicken, French fries and pickled cucumber, rolled tight and pressed on the grill until the bread crackles.
- Tray-baked taouk
- Skip the skewers, spread the marinated chicken over a tray with onion wedges and peppers, and roast at 220°C for 25 minutes, finishing under the grill. Weeknight version, no charcoal, no shaping.
- Taouk with saffron
- A Gulf-influenced variation: a pinch of saffron steeped in warm water goes into the marinade, giving the chicken a gold tint and a floral edge behind the garlic.
Storage & reheating.
Grilled chicken keeps 3 days refrigerated and is excellent cold in a sandwich. Reheat in a hot dry pan for a minute or two per side rather than in a microwave, which turns the crust rubbery. Raw marinated chicken can be frozen in its marinade for 2 months — thaw in the fridge overnight and grill as normal. Toum keeps 3 to 4 weeks in a sealed jar in the fridge; the raw garlic mellows noticeably after the first few days, which some people prefer.
Serve with
Warm flatbread, toum, pickled turnips and a plate of tabbouleh or fattoush; grilled tomato and onion halves cooked on the same skewers.
The story behind Shish Taouk.
The name is straightforwardly Ottoman: şiş is the skewer, tavuk is chicken, and grilled meat on a metal rod is one of the oldest and least contested foods in the eastern Mediterranean. What Lebanon did was make chicken the equal of lamb on the mashawi grill and pair it, permanently, with toum. That pairing is not decorative. Toum is raw garlic emulsified with oil and lemon into something the texture of thick mayonnaise but with none of its softness — it is aggressive, almost hot, and it exists to cut through charred chicken fat. A shish taouk sandwich without toum is a different and lesser sandwich, and Lebanese customers will say so.
The dish belongs to the culture of the mashwi shop and the rotating vertical spit. Along the Beirut corniche and in every Lebanese town, snack shops build a sandwich the same way: hot bread pressed on the grill, a stripe of toum, chips inside the roll rather than beside it, pickled cucumbers or pink turnip, then the chicken slid straight off the skewer. The whole thing goes back onto the press so the bread crisps and the toum melts into it. Emigration exported that sandwich efficiently — it is a fixture of Lebanese diaspora shops from São Paulo to Sydney to Michigan, usually run by families two or three generations from Lebanon.
At home the skewer is a party format. Shish taouk turns up on charcoal grills at family gatherings alongside lamb kebab and kafta, with a spread of mezze in front of it and the grill master eating standing up, which appears to be the rule. The recipe below is scaled for a domestic grill pan or oven grill as well as charcoal, because most people do not have a mangal and the chicken is still worth making without one.
Questions, answered.
Why did my toum split into a puddle of oil?
The oil went in too fast, or too early. Garlic and salt need to be pounded or blitzed to a smooth paste first, then the oil must go in almost drop by drop for the first 100 ml, alternating with lemon juice, before you can speed up. To rescue a split batch, start again with one fresh garlic clove and a teaspoon of lemon, and dribble the broken mixture into it as if it were oil.
Can I make shish taouk without a barbecue?
Yes. A ridged cast-iron grill pan preheated until it smokes gives good bar marks and real browning, and an oven grill on its highest setting with the tray 10 cm from the element works too — turn every 3 or 4 minutes. What you lose is charcoal smoke, which is a real loss but not a fatal one; a pinch of smoked paprika in the marinade compensates a little.
How long should the chicken marinate?
Four hours minimum, overnight is better, and 24 hours is the outer limit. Yogurt marinades work slowly because the acid is mild, so short marinades barely season past the surface. Past a day, the lemon starts breaking the meat down too far and the texture turns soft and mealy once cooked.
Is shish taouk the same as chicken shawarma?
No. Shish taouk is cubed chicken on a skewer, marinated in yogurt, lemon and garlic, and grilled over direct heat. Shawarma is thin slices of marinated chicken stacked onto a vertical rotisserie and shaved off as the outside cooks, with a spicier, more vinegar-forward marinade. They often share a counter and a sandwich format, but they are different cuts, marinades and cooking methods.
How do I know when the chicken is done?
The cubes should be opaque throughout with clearly charred edges and juices that run clear when a piece is pierced; on a thermometer, 74°C at the centre of the largest cube. Thigh meat stays moist a few degrees past that, so err on the side of a proper char rather than pulling it early and getting pale, pallid skewers.
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All Lebanon recipes Chicken recipes Yogurt recipes Garlic recipes mainstreet foodgluten freehalal friendlyRecipe by The DishRoute Kitchen · published August 19, 2026 · updated August 19, 2026