Chicken Shawarma Wraps

These Chicken Shawarma Wraps are easy to make with a tasty marinade and tons of fresh flavor! Traditional shawarma meats are cooked stacked on a vertical spit, but as most people don’t have that ability at home, I roasted my chicken in the oven. You could also grill the chicken in this recipe if that’s your preference! I found the marinade for this recipe in the NY Times cooking app, though I chose to use chicken breasts instead of the more commonly used thighs to lighten it up a bit. I served my chicken sliced and wrapped in a pita with roasted onions, lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, parsley and an easy homemade white sauce and it was so delicious. Better still, the entire wrap with all those ingredients is just 298 calories or 4 WW Points on the current Weight Watchers plan! To view your current WW Points for this recipe and track it in the WW app or site, click here!

Ingredient Notes

• Chicken Cutlets: You’re going to want to use chicken breast cutlets that are uniformly thinly sliced to about ½” thick. If your cutlets are different thicknesses they can cook unevenly with the thinner parts drying out while the thicker parts finish cooking. You can buy chicken breast cutlets in the store or make them on your own by slicing full-sized breasts in half horizontally to make two cutlets. If needed, you can pound your cutlets a bit to ensure even thickness.
• Pita: I use Joseph’s Flax, Oat Bran and Whole Wheat Pita Bread because they taste good, are a good size, and are only 60 calories or 1 WW Point each! I buy them at Wegmans, but it looks like they are also sold at Walmart. If you choose to use a different pita you may need to adjust the WW Points and estimated nutrition information.
• White Sauce: I decided to make a white sauce for these Chicken Shawarma Wraps, which is typically yogurt with lemon juice and garlic mixed in for a bright and creamy topping to the chicken. I chose to also mix in mayonnaise and tahini for added flavor. If you don’t have tahini on hand you can make the white sauce without tahini, but if you like a nutty sesame flavor then tahini is a very tasty addition! Just make sure to stir/shake the tahini before using because it can separate.
• Optional Additions: My Chicken Shawarma Wraps are filled with roasted chicken and onions, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, parsley, and white sauce. If you’re not a fan of one of the vegetables I used (for example, my husband doesn’t like cucumbers) then just leave it out! You can also add additional ingredients to your wrap such as olives, Feta cheese, hummus, bell peppers, or hot sauce to spice it up.

Recipe Tips

• Chicken Amount: I weighed the chicken after cooking and it was 1 lb 7 oz chicken total which is eight servings of 2.875 oz each. Each wrap will call for that much chicken, but if your slices end up a little short or a little over you can just think of it as somewhere between 2.75 – 3 ounces each.
• Marinating Time: I recommend putting the chicken in the marinade in the morning and then taking it out to cook at dinner time for maximum flavor absorption! However, if you aren’t able to do that you can marinate it for less time and still get tasty results.
• Other Uses for the Chicken: I love serving this marinated chicken in these Chicken Shawarma Wraps, but you could also use it in other ways. If you don’t have any pita on hand or you just want to change it up, definitely try serving this chicken over salad (I like it with a Greek vinaigrette) or alongside rice or other grains.
• Twine: I used butcher’s twine to tie the wraps up for the photos just so that they’d stay folded the way you’d hold them. Feel free to do the same for serving if you’d like, but it’s not necessary.

Just before baking!

Tracking Marinades

As I mentioned, I found this marinade in The New York Times cooking app and it’s delicious! Marinades make it a little tricky to calculate WW Points and nutrition information since the chicken absorbs some of the marinade, but most of it is discarded. The way I generally calculate a marinade is by weighing the marinade before adding the chicken and then weighing it again once removing the chicken after the marination time. Then I calculate a rough percentage of how much marinade was used vs discarded and then calculate the WW Points and nutrition information using that percentage of each marinade ingredient. It’s probably not a perfect method but it makes sense to me and gives a pretty good estimate of how much marinade is actually being used/consumed. For this recipe I weighed the marinade in the Ziploc bag before adding anything and then again after marinating the chicken and tossing the onions in it, and about 60% of the weight remained. As such, I calculated the recipe using roughly 40% of the marinade ingredients because that’s about how much was absorbed.

More tasty chicken recipes

Looking for more tasty, lightened up, chicken recipes? Check out my Blackened Chicken Bites, Nashville Hot Chicken Bites, Lemon Pepper Chicken Bites, Greek Chicken Bites, Barbecue Chicken Bites, Apple and Brie Stuffed Chicken, Slow Cooker Chicken and Stuffing, Strawberry Balsamic Grilled Chicken, Ricotta Stuffed Chicken Bake, Cream Cheese and Herb Stuffed Chicken, Tuscan Olive Chicken, Crispy Cheddar Chicken with Cream Sauce, Pimento Cheese Stuffed Chicken, Cream Cheese Stuffed Everything Chicken, and so many more in the Chicken category of my recipe index!

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Chicken Shawarma Wraps

Prep Time: 25 minutes mins

Cook Time: 20 minutes mins

Marinating Time: 8 hours hrs

Total Time: 8 hours hrs 45 minutes mins

Calories: 298kcal

These Chicken Shawarma Wraps are easy to make with a tasty marinade and tons of fresh flavor!

Yield: 8 wraps

Ingredients

Marinade

• 2 lemons, juiced
• ½ cup olive oil
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• ½ teaspoon turmeric
• a pinch cinnamon
• ¼ - ½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

Other Ingredients

• 2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast cutlets, ( ½” thick)
• 1 medium red onion, peeled and cut into eight wedges
• ¾ cup plain fat free Greek yogurt, (I use Fage 0%)
• 2 tablespoons light mayonnaise, (I use Hellmanns)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon tahini, stirred
• ¼ teaspoon garlic powder
• 8 pitas, (I use Joseph’s Flax, Oat Bran and Whole Wheat Pita Bread)
• 8 leaves green leaf lettuce
• 2 medium tomatoes, thinly sliced
• ½ medium cucumber, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Instructions

• Place all the marinade ingredients in a mixing bowl and whisk together until combined. Place the chicken breast cutlets in a zip-top bag and pour the marinade over top of the chicken. Seal the bag and toss/massage the contents until the chicken coated in the marinade. Place the bag in the refrigerator and allow to marinate for at least 2 hours, up to 12 hours.
• When ready to cook, heat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit and line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper. Lift each chicken cutlet out of the marinade letting the excess drop off before transferring it to the baking sheet. When the chicken is removed, place the onion wedges into the marinade and toss to coat. Transfer the onion pieces to the baking sheet as well, spreading it out alongside the chicken.
• When the oven is heated, place the baking sheet inside and roast for 16-22 minutes until the chicken cutlets are cooked through. Turn the oven to broil and stick the sheet under the broiler for an additional minute or two to brown everything up and finish off the onions. Allow the chicken to rest for 10 minutes before slicing to allow it to retain its juices. When rested, cut into thin slices.
• In a small mixing bowl, stir together the Greek yogurt, mayonnaise, lemon juice, stirred tahini, and garlic powder until well combined.
• To build each wrap, lay a pita on a clean dry surface and top with 1 large lettuce leaf and then 1-2 tomato slices, stacked in a line down the center of the wrap. On top of the tomatoes put a row of cucumbers followed by about 1/8^th of the roasted onions. Follow with 2.875 ounces of the sliced chicken and then top with two tablespoons of the white sauce. Sprinkle with parsley and serve! Repeat with remaining ingredients to form 8 wraps.

Notes

WW Points per wrap: 4 (SP calculated using the recipe builder on weightwatchers.com)

 To view your current WW Points for this recipe and track it in the WW app or site, click here!

Nutrition Information per wrap:
298 calories, 16 g carbs, 3 g sugars, 12 g fat, 2 g saturated fat, 35 g protein, 5 g fiber, 431 mg sodium (from myfitnesspal.com)

Weight Watchers Points Plus:
8 per wrap (PP calculated using a Weight Watchers PointsPlus calculator and the nutrition info below)

Adapted from The New York Times

Author: Emily Bites

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: American, Middle Eastern

Keyword: Chicken Marinade, Healthy Meal, Oven Roasted, Weight Watchers, White Sauce, WW Recipes