One of the nicer aspects of my job also happens to be one of my unofficial job duties: cooking for our bi-weekly team lunch meeting. It’s no secret that I love to cook, and since our office has a full kitchen and a decent-sized gas grill, I’ve got some room to play. It’s consistently one of the few meals I prep for more than just myself, and work picks up the tab (it’s often cheaper than ordering pizza) so I see it as a pretty awesome win-win.
Most weeks, I keep things relatively simple; in the summer I’ll grill up brats or burgers, and in the colder months I might throw together a pan of lasagna the night before. These last few weeks have been busy for us, though, and my boss told me to swing for the fences this week and take things up a notch. With that in mind, I settled on kebabs, which isn’t something I tend to do myself very often, but seemed like a decent departure from the usual fare.
I wound up doing two different marinades for the kebabs, with one marinade covering chicken, green peppers, onions, and pineapple; and the other marinade covering beef, steak-cut mushrooms, and zucchini. I had given some thought to doing fingerling potatoes as well, but frankly I ran out of space on the grill, and in the marinade pan. While they would have been tasty, they also would have taken a little while to cook on the grill, and between the pasta salad and the brownies, people seemed pleasantly full by the end of the meeting.
One thing I should note about the spice blends mentioned here: there’s an awesome store in downtown Holland called The Seasoned Home, which sells, as you might guess, seasoning blends (they also have a great collection of dry soup mixes and some interesting novelty kitchenware and decor). While the spice blends are more expensive than your usual McCormick-variety blends at the grocery store, I like them because 1) they’re not THAT expensive, 2) buying local is a good thing, and 3) they have literally dozens of different spice blends for everything from steak and chicken to rice and vegetables. It’s proven to be a great go-to for gifts, and if you want to find a dozen new ways to season a chicken breast, this place is great.
That said – feel free to try these with the spice blend of your choosing, be it your own local shop or your favorite supermarket.
Red Wine Beef Kebab Marinade
1 cup red wine (I used Apothic Red for mine, because it’s an inexpensive blend)
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons Seasoned Home Backyard Chophouse Butcher Rub (if you’re going the generic route, Montreal steak seasoning would be a close substitute)
Makes approximately 1 1/2 cups marinade, which I used with 2lb of chuckeye steak, 3 small zucchini, and 8oz steak-cut mushrooms.
Mix thoroughly and pour over cubed steak and/or veggies. Marinate for 3-6 hours and grill over direct, high heat.
One observation on the beef marinade – the spice blend I used includes coarse garlic salt, and a fair amount of it at that. The salt didn’t seem too eager to dissolve in the marinade (admittedly I was prepping this at 8:30 in the morning and wasn’t in a mood to let it sit) and what I marinated definitely picked up some of the saltiness. If that’s something you’d rather avoid, I’d recommend a separate blend, or perhaps a combination of coarsely ground black pepper, coriander, and (some) crushed red pepper.
Citrus Chicken Kebab Marinade
1 cup orange juice (pineapple juice would also work well, but I was playing clean out the fridge)
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons Seasoned Home Sweet Orange Habanero spice blend
Makes approximately 1 1/2 cups marinade, which I used with 2lb of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, 1 large yellow onion, 1 green bell pepper, and approximately 2 cups chunk pineapple.
Mix thoroughly and pour over cut chicken and/or veggies. Marinate for 3/6 hours and grill over direct, high heat.
And finally, a few thoughts on grilling kebabs
My boss had originally suggested spare ribs as the “kick it up a notch” suggestion. While I’ve made ribs on a gas grill before, I can’t say I recommend it; flare-ups are a real issue, and if you’re trying to slow-cook something, you should probably switch to charcoal. Ditto for skin-on chicken thighs or legs – low and slow is the way to go. I’m sure it can be done on a gas grill, but I only use gas at work and lack the requisite experience.
That being said, gas grills are fantastic for kebabs. You’ve got a ton of workspace, and you can apply consistent, high heat, which is what I recommend for kebabs. Couple of other pointers:
- Don’t cut your protein so small; the goal here should be cubes 1-2″ in size. Anything smaller than that and you risk turning your steak or chicken into tough dice-sized pieces of meat.
The couple of extra minutes it takes won’t hurt anything, and the payoff is totally worth it. - Don’t bother getting really nice beef. I went with chuckeye steak, which I considered a reasonably lean, cheap cut of meat. You can afford to cook that a little longer on the grill without worrying that you’ve ruined it, and the marinade should compensate for the tougher texture.
- Assemble skewers of meat, and skewers of veggies, separately. I recommend this for two reasons: one, it mollifies the picker eaters who don’t want a kebab with green peppers or onions (like me); and second, it gives you the ability to pull items off the grill as they’re done, so that faster items like the peppers or the zucchini aren’t cooked to mush while you wait for the chicken to cook through all the way.
Summer’s almost here. Get grilling!
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