Charcoal grills for souvlaki and kalamaki

This trips up a lot of buyers, so it is worth being plain about it before you spend anything.

Souvla is the Cypriot method: large pieces of lamb or pork, sometimes several kilos at a time, threaded onto one long heavy spit and turned slowly over low coals for a couple of hours. It needs a rotisserie. The traditional Cypriot rig for it is the foukou, and there are several sold here that do the job well.

Souvlaki and kalamaki are the opposite end of the same tradition: meat cut to roughly the size of a walnut, threaded onto short skewers, cooked fast and close over hot coals in a matter of minutes. Kalamaki means little reed, which is what the skewer originally was.

Everything below is about the second job.

Souvlaki is a fast cook. The meat is small, the fire is hot, and the whole thing is over in five to ten minutes. That puts three demands on the equipment.

Heat you can move

Pork neck and chicken thigh want to be close to the coals so the outside colours before the inside dries out. Anything with lemon and honey in the marinade wants to be further away or it will blacken while the middle is still cold. A grill with a fixed grate height forces you to manage this by moving food around instead, which is why one end of the batch is always further along than the other.

Turning, constantly

A skewer over direct coals needs turning every minute or two. With four skewers that is fine. With twenty four it is a problem, because turning them one at a time takes long enough that the first skewer is a full rotation ahead of the last one by the time you finish.

Enough room to cook for the number who turn up

Greek and Cypriot cooking is rarely for four people. The grill needs to hold a real load without you running three batches.

The frames on this site take a geared skewer rack. Every skewer sits in the same rack and the rack turns as one piece, so a single pull on the handle turns all sixteen, twenty four or thirty two at once.

That solves the turning problem directly. A full load presents the same face to the fire at the same moment, so the batch stays together instead of drifting apart, and you are not stood over the coals working down a row with tongs while the far end catches.

These are hand-turned frames. There is no motor, and for souvlaki that is the right arrangement: you want to decide when it turns based on what the meat looks like, not have a motor decide for you at a fixed speed.