Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Shawarma-licious

For those who do not know what shawarmas are, imagine donair meat, but instead of the sweet sauce replace with a garlic-tahini sauce. Add many vegetables, onions, pickled purple things, and it's grand. Yesterday I was thinking about supper, and decided I wanted a shawarma. I've not seen them outside Ontario yet, so it was decided that I would make one instead of hitchhiking to Ottawa to pick one up.
A quick Google gave me this site. Unfortunately, of all those ingredients for the sauce, we only had less than 1/2-cup tahini. So it was time to improvise:

Owen's Patented Trademarked Copyrighted Peanutty Shawarma Sauce Recipe

  • Fill a 1/2-cup measure about 2/3s full with tahini
  • Top up with natural, non-sweetened peanut butter (This is essential. Sweetened will really weird it up. Crunchy PB works well)
  • Put in bowl. Add 1 tbsp yogurt. (We only had vanilla yogurt, not plain. It didn't actually affect it that much)
  • Add ~1/2 tsp garlic powder (Real garlic, although possible, will be very, very strong)
  • Add juice of 1/2 of a lime
  • Mix all up. Add olive oil to decent sauce/paste-like consistency
It may sound a little strange, but it was quite good, approved by the whole family there. It's pretty healthy (I think) and mostly natural.

I'm now 2/3 of the way through my French course, and have finished setting up the next set of experiments. I'll be spending the next couple of days cleaning the lab and sorting all my samples. Also, I'll possibly be gathering new samples.

5 comments:

Meags said...

In Texas, the donair equivalent is the Greek Gyro.

Owen the unemployed Biologist said...

I've heard of gyros, and I've seen them for sale in Halifax. I bought one, but it was essentially a wrap in a thick pita, nothing that special.

Are the gyros in Texas like donairs, complete with meat and sweet sauce?

Anonymous said...

Yum!!! Sounds so good Owen!
In Ottawa we have shawarma's mainly, but we also have gyros, and donairs are rare.
Mmmm.... shawarmas.....

Anonymous said...

PS> You can still hitch-hike to Ottawa though....

Meags said...

The gyros here have "gyro meat" in them which sounds vaguely reminiscent of "mystery meat". I think the main difference is that they don't have the sweet sauce, I think that is a donair thing.