Charcoal grills for kebabs

Kebab covers a lot of ground, and the equipment needs are not identical across it.

Cubed meat

Shish kebab and shish taouk are cubes of lamb or marinated chicken threaded onto a skewer. They sit stably, they turn cleanly, and almost any skewer will hold them. The cook is fast and close to the coals.

Minced meat

Adana and kafta are different. The meat is minced, seasoned and pressed by hand along the skewer, and it has no structure of its own until the outside sets. Two things follow from that. It needs a wide, flat skewer, because a round one lets the whole cylinder of meat spin loose the moment you turn it. And it needs the fire managed carefully at the start, because minced meat that hits a fierce fire before it has set will drop off into the coals.

A Turkish or Lebanese grill is long and narrow for a reason: it puts a whole row of skewers over the fire at once, which is how you feed a table rather than a person.

The catch is what happens next. Twenty skewers over direct coals all need turning within about the same sixty second window. Working down the row with your hands near the fire, you turn the first one, and by the time you reach the twentieth the first has had another minute on its new side. Over three or four rotations that difference compounds into a row where the ends are cooked properly and the middle is not, or the reverse.

The frames here gear the skewers to each other so one handle turns the row as a single unit. That is the whole idea, and on a long row it is the difference between cooking and firefighting.

Levantine grilling is direct and hot, but not uniformly so. The useful arrangement is a hot zone and a cooler one, so meat that is colouring too fast has somewhere to go.

On the F1 and F2 the charcoal tray raises and lowers under the grate, which gives you a coarse but genuinely useful version of that control: lift the coals for the initial sear on lamb, drop them away for chicken that needs longer to come up to temperature without the marinade burning.

Bank the coals to one side rather than spreading them evenly and you get a second axis of control on top of that.