Build Better Chicken Skewers With Help From An Empty Juice Carton

Chicken skewers are a barbecue favorite as well as a colorful and convenient way to stack all of your favorite veggies and proteins into a handheld meal. Building chicken skewers is a straightforward process of cutting, piercing, and sliding each ingredient along the skewer. It may be easy, but building a skewer is time-consuming. With the help of an empty juice carton, you can build better chicken skewers at lightning speed.

The idea behind this juice carton hack (from Scrumdiddlyumptious on Youtube) is that it provides the perfect rectangular mold to help you build four skewers at once. You'll need a rectangular container, like Minute Maid orange juice carton. Cut the top off of the container with scissors and cut a small window out of one of the wider faces of the carton so that you can see what you're stacking. You can then add whole boneless chicken breasts interspersed with layers of much larger slices of veggies. Once you've stacked all your ingredients inside the empty carton, you can pierce the block with four separate skewers; two skewers will be placed close to each corner of the rectangular opening.

Once all the skewers are in, you can remove the block of ingredients from the carton and quarter the block with a sharp butcher knife, like this one from Syokami. Instead of having to cut each ingredient into potentially variably sized pieces to assemble one at a time, the carton hack saves you the chopping and creates 4 uniform skewers that will all cook at the same rate.

The carton trick will speed up your preparation times significantly, which is especially useful for making chicken skewers for a crowd. You can round out a speedy preparation with other useful cooking and seasoning hacks. While bamboo skewers are eco-friendly and cheap, they will need to be soaked before grilling to prevent them from burning. So if you're an avid griller, invest in metal skewers, like these from Mocumei, to save you that step. Our recipe for za'atar chicken skewers grills them for 5 minutes on each side, so choose veggies that take roughly the same amount of time to cook. Eggplant, bell peppers, four or five layers of onion, and zucchini are all good options. You can also adjust the thickness of each veggie slice to coincide with the cooking times it'll take the chicken to grill.

Marinades and dry rubs are often included in skewer recipes, but you can save yourself the hassle of making the blends and waiting for meat to soak by using store-bought sauces instead. Barbecue sauce, Italian salad dressing, chipotle mayonnaise, and honey mustard would all taste great as basting liquids. Simply squeeze the sauce into a bowl, then brush it over each side of your skewer as it cooks over the grill. You can also apply the carton hack to other types of meat or fish, like these grilled teriyaki tuna skewers. Shiitake mushrooms may be too small and amorphous for a carton, but you could swap them for large, meaty portobellos.