Spicy Lemon-Garlic Sauce for Shrimp Skewers
Recipe
We got grilling with six different sets to find the best of the bunch.
Published July 1, 2013. Appears in America's Test Kitchen TV Season 14: Grilled Kofte and Vegetables
We’ve been burned by skewers before. Bamboo and wood scorches; super-thin double prongs are flimsy; smooth, rounded prongs let food spin in place when you’re trying to flip it. Still, manufacturer innovations promise improvement, so we gathered six sets ($6.85 to $29.95), including our previous no-frills favorite, and threaded them with chicken-vegetable kebabs; scallops; and kofte, a kebab of ground meat and herbs. Metal was best, but solid tab handles on one set retained heat, so serving was a burn risk; loop handles on our two favorite models dispersed heat quickly. One model’s “heat-resistant” plastic slider melted. Double-pronged skewers splayed out awkwardly, so threading them through food was a struggle. Their thickness also tore tender scallops. Curved rods occupied too much grill real estate, tangled easily, and only let us turn food 180 degrees. We’ll stick with our former champ: Not only does it have the smartest design, but it’s also the cheapest.
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