Egyptian Shawarma Seasoning

Shawarma is a method before it is a recipe: thin slices of marinated meat stacked into a cone on a vertical spit, turned against a flame for hours, and shaved off in ribbons as the outside cooks. The spit is the part you cannot bring home. The marinade is the part you can, and it is where nearly all the flavour lives.

Sweet paprika leads this blend, and it leads for two reasons. It carries the deep red colour that makes shawarma look like shawarma, and it gives a mild, fruity sweetness that stands up to a long marinade without turning bitter. Cumin and coriander come next and do what they always do in Egyptian cooking: earthy base, citrus lift.

Then the warm spices, and this is where a shawarma blend parts company with a kofta one. Cinnamon and allspice are more forward here, cardamom joins them, and there is a small amount of clove and nutmeg right at the back. That warm, faintly sweet edge is what makes shaved meat in bread taste of Cairo rather than of a generic grill, and it is why the same blend works on chicken and on beef.

There is a little turmeric, and its job is colour rather than flavour. Chicken shawarma should come off the pan golden rather than pale, and turmeric plus paprika does that without anything artificial. At the quantity used here you will not taste it as turmeric; take it much further and the mixture turns bitter and chalky, which is the usual mistake.

The blend is salt-free. Shawarma is normally salted in the marinade and then eaten with tahina, pickles and sometimes salted chips inside the same sandwich, so how much salt belongs in the meat depends entirely on what you are putting around it. That decision stays yours. There is no starch, rusk or colouring either.

The method is worth writing out, because the marinade does all the work the spit would. For 500 g of chicken thigh or beef sliced thin against the grain, use about three level teaspoons - roughly 15 g - with two tablespoons of yoghurt or oil, the juice of half a lemon, two cloves of crushed garlic and salt to your taste. Yoghurt suits chicken, oil and a splash of vinegar suit beef.

Marinate cold for at least two hours and preferably overnight, then cook it hot and fast in a wide pan in batches, so the meat browns instead of stewing. Crowd the pan and it releases water and goes grey. Let the edges catch and go slightly crisp - that char is what stands in for the spit at home. Serve in flatbread with tahina, tomato, parsley and pickles.

Spiced, marinated grilled meat of this kind has a long history of traditional use across Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, and that is offered here as a description of that history rather than as a health claim, and it is not medical advice. The same blend is worth having for roast cauliflower and chickpeas, which take a shawarma marinade remarkably well.