A skewer is a thin metal or wood stick used to hold pieces of food together.
In English, brochette is a borrowing of the French word for skewer. In cookery, en brochette means 'on a skewer', and describes the form of a dish or the method of cooking and serving pieces of food, especially grilled meat or seafood, on skewers; for example "lamb cubes en brochette".
Utensil
Metal skewers are typically stainless steel rods with a pointed tip on one end and a grip of some kind on the other end for ease of removing the food. Non-metallic skewers are often made from
bamboo, as well as
such as
birch,
beech,
or other suitable wood. Prior to grilling, wooden skewers may be soaked in water to avoid burning. A related device is the
rotisserie or spit, a large rod that rotates meat while it cooks.
History
At the 300,000-year-old Schöningen site in Germany. A stick with a burnt tip was suggested to have been used to cook meat over a fire,
though later scholars have questioned this interpretation.
Excavations of the
Minoan settlement of Akrotiri unearthed stone "
" used before the 17th century BCE. In these supports there are pairs of indentations that may have been used for holding skewers.
[ To Vima (in Greek), 6-2-2011 (picture 2 of 7)] Homer in
Iliad (1.465) mentions pieces of meat roasted on spits (ὀβελός, obelós). In
Classical Greece, a small spit or skewer was known as ὀβελίσκος (obeliskos),
[ ὀβελίσκος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus, dim. of ὀβελός ( obelos), ὀβελός.] and
Aristophanes mentions such skewers being used to roast thrushes.
[ Acharnians 1007] The story is often told of medieval Middle Eastern soldiers - usually Turkish or Persian, depending on the storyteller – who cooked meat skewered on their swords.
One of the most well-known skewered foods around the world is the shish kebab. The earliest literary evidence for the Turkish word şiş (shish) as a food utensil comes from the 11th-century Diwan Lughat al-Turk, attributed to Mahmud of Kashgar. He defines shish as both a skewer and 'tool for arranging noodles' (minzam tutmaj), though he is unique in this regard as all subsequent known historical references to shish define it as a skewer.
Examples of skewered foods
Kebab
A large variety of dishes cooked on skewers are
(meat dishes prevalent in Middle Eastern cuisine and the
Muslim world), or derived from them. Examples include Turkish
shish kebab, Iranian
jujeh kabab, Chinese
chuan, and Southeast Asian
satay. However,
kebab is not synonymous with "skewered food", and many kebab dishes such as
chapli kebab are not cooked on skewers. On the other hand, English speakers may sometimes use the word
kebab to refer to any food on a skewer.
Other
Dishes, other than kebabs, prepared with skewers include American
city chicken and
corn dog, Brazilian
churrasco, indigenous Peruvian
anticucho, Indonesian
satay, Italian
arrosticini, Greek
souvlaki, Japanese
kushiyaki and
kushikatsu, Korean
jeok and
kkochi, Nepali
sekuwa, Portuguese
espetada, Serbian
ražnjići, Vietnamese
nem nướng and
chạo tôm, Chinese
shaokao, and Malaysian-Singaporean
Lok-lok.
Appetizers and hors d'oeuvres may often be skewered together with small sticks or toothpicks; the Spanish pincho is named after such a skewer.
File:Chenjeh1.jpg|Chenjeh kebab in Iran
File:Seafood skewers.jpg|Seafood skewers sold in South Korea: mun-kkochi (giant octopus), sora-kkochi (Turbo sazae), and jju-kkochi (webfoot octopus).
File:Skewered food at Shida Night Market in Taipei.jpg|Fish ball skewers at Shida Night Market in Taipei, Taiwan
File:Brochette de dinde sur une assiette pres de Jijel 1.JPG|Khebab from Algeria
See also
External links
