Perfect Grilled Fruit Skewer Ideas during the Holidays
When it comes to making dishes for a barbecue cookout, skewers are often one of the best and easy to make options. Only a little less of a staple than burgers and hotdogs, skewers can easily be eaten during activities and include a range of different foods, making each skewer recipe different from the others. Even the food used in one recipe can vary. If one guest wants chicken and onions while another wants beef, bell peppers and tomatoes, both skewer ideas can easily be prepared and grilled without needing new seasoning.
What makes skewers and their more ethnic counterparts kebabs especially great is the ability to fruits as well as meat and vegetables. Often, these fruits are far more tropical, since they tend to be much sweeter or tarter than the fruits of most temperate climates. However, you can still find great fruit skewer ideas that use apples, oranges or even peaches, all of which are easy to get at your local grocery store.
This article has some great fresh fruit skewer ideas that you can try out during the holidays. If you need any accessories, tools or even rubs to help you grill these dishes, you can visit Dickson Barbeque Centre for all that and more!
Chicken and mango skewers
A great way to add fruit to your holiday’s barbeque skewers is to make them with chicken and mango. Mango is a rather exotic fruit, one that often gets added to dishes and juices as part of a tropical flavour. Depending on the ripeness, mangos are either mostly sweet or tart. Chicken, on the other hand, has a rather neutral flavour profile that makes it great to be added to a wide variety of dishes with an equally large range of seasonings. When mixed and served with mangos, the end result is a deliciously sweet but tart dish.
The skewers themselves are incredibly simple to make. To make them, you need to first season a pound of one inch cubed chicken breasts with salt and pepper before leaving them to rest in the fridge for at least 15 minutes. Then, cut a medium mango into one inch as well and prepare the skewers, making sure to alternate between chicken and mango.
To grill them, simply turn the heat up to medium and grill the fruit skewers for 10 to 12 minutes or until the chicken isn’t pink, making sure to turn them roughly every four to five minutes. Some recipes also serve these fruit skewers with butter sauteed corn, which you can easily make by cooking them for 5 minutes or so.
Kiwi and chicken kebabs in honey chipotle sauce
Kiwis are one of the oddest but also the best fruits to try grilled. Though not quite as tropical as mangos, kiwis are just unique enough to be quite an impressive addition to a skewer or kebab. Unlike mangos, a ripe kiwi is just a little more art than it is sweet, making it a perfect combination with chicken. Mixing it with the honey chipotle sauce this recipe calls for gets you great sweet and spicy kebabs with a tart kick.
Like the recipe above, you’ll need to cut a pound of boneless chicken breasts into one inch cubes, cut eight kiwis into halves or quarters, and season them both with garlic, oil, salt and lime juice. Cover the chicken and kiwis and refrigerate them for 30 minutes while you prepare the sauce. While the recipe calls for chipotle peppers, you can substitute them for either chipotle powder or smoked paprika and mix it with honey.
Put your chicken and kiwi onto skewers and grill them over medium heat for 10 to 12 minutes, flipping them regularly and applying the sauce during the last few minutes.
Tropical island shrimp kebabs
If you really want to add a tropical feel to your barbeque’s dishes, mixing seafood and fruit is often a great idea. For this particular recipe, you’ll need to get a few more exotic ingredients and fruits, like pineapples and coconut milk. While it may be expensive at first, the dish is more than likely going to be quite impressive.
Start by adding minced cilantro, lime juice, minced garlic, olive oil, ground coriander, salt and ground pepper into a ziploc bag with half a cup of coconut milk and your shrimp. Coat the shrimp with your marinade and let it refrigerate for two hours. Cut your mango and pineapple into cubes, roughly the same amount of cubes as your shrimp then put them onto your skewers. Grill the shrimp over medium heat or until the shrimp turn pink.
Grilled peach and pineapple sangria
Every great barbecue cookout needs an equally great drink after all! These fruit skewer ideas are especially great since you can whip up a batch of these sangrias while you’re barbecuing your main dish. As the name suggests, this drink recipe needs 3 peaches for sweetness and a quarter of a pineapple for a bit of tartness.
To make the drinks, mix your choice of white wine with two cups of lemonade and half a cup of orange liqueur. Then, to prepare the fruits for grilling, mix together melted butter, sugar and ground cinnamon and brush the mixture over your cut fruit. Grease your grill’s grate and grill the fruit for eight to ten minutes, flipping them over halfway.
Once it’s done grilling, transfer ¾ of the fruit to your glasses and pour your sangria over it. If you use smaller soaked wood skewers to grill your fruit, simply place one in each glass and set them in the fridge to chill before serving. You can also substitute the sangria for a citrus soda, if you want to make these drinks non-alcoholic!
Takeaway
Fruit skewers are a great way to add some new and unique flavours to your holiday barbecue cookouts and backyard parties. While many of these dishes use more tropical fruits, some also use more local fruits you can get from your supermarket. Regardless of what the fruits are and where they’re from, fruit skewers add a fresh taste to an otherwise heavy meal, and can be highly impressive too!