Easy Homemade Shawarma

A Good Home Cook Tries Shawarma

Spending hours in the kitchen — cooking new recipes or returning to old favorites — is something I genuinely enjoy. I’ll never call myself a chef, but I am a home cook with thirty years of experience. My skills aren’t on par with a CIA graduate, but I know my way around the basics and can plate up some good food.

On Viral Recipes and YouTube Rabbit Holes

I watch a handful of YouTube channels and enjoy the genre of chefs reacting to viral recipes. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of most viral recipes. They often don’t come together, don’t taste right, or just look awful. But the few chef channels I’ve come to trust consistently deliver: layers of flavor, interesting textures, and food worth actually making.

How This Recipe Got on My Radar

A viral doner kebab recipe caught my eye on Instagram a few months ago. I sent the link to my sister — another excellent home cook — and we had a quick back-and-forth about it. Then recently, I watched Gustavo Tosta, better known as Guga, recreate his Shawarma Hack using the All Recipes Easy Doner-Style Kebab recipe. GugaFoods is well known for his love of picanha steak and his creative experiments. His enthusiasm for the result got me curious enough to try it myself.

How I Made It

The recipe combines ground beef and ground lamb with grated onion, Greek yogurt, and warm spices. I substituted ground chicken for the lamb. Working in 280-gram portions, I rolled the mixture out between sheets of parchment paper. Then I folded them up and placed them on a sheet tray. They cooked for 30–35 minutes at 400°F. After that, I removed the parchment and cooked for another 10 minutes to get some color.

The Result — and My Mistakes

For an easy homemade shawarma, this is a solid recipe. That said, I made a few mistakes worth noting.

First, I went lighter on the spices than the recipe called for. I realized afterward I could have used the full amounts without hesitation. Second, I used 90/10 ground beef when 80/20 would have been right. This recipe needs the fat. Combined with very lean ground chicken, the end result was a bit dry. The Greek yogurt sauce, tomato, parsley, and pickled red onion helped with both flavor and texture. Still, I wasn’t about to drop the shawarma into a wet beef base just to rehydrate it.

Writing this up, I caught a third mistake. I left the top sheet of parchment on during the initial cook when it should have come off. That likely affected the texture more than I realized at the time.

Would I Make This Again?

Absolutely. If you don’t own a vertical rotisserie or a shawarma skewer — like the one I’ve seen Sonny at ThatDudeCanCook use — this technique is a great workaround. Next time, I’ll use 80/20 beef, trust the spice amounts, and pull the parchment off when I’m supposed to.