Khorovats can be made with lamb, pork, beef, chicken, or less commonly veal.

2006 book Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore gives three tips for making good khorovats:[4] In Armenia itself, khorovats is often made with the bone still in the meat (as lamb or pork chops).

[4] In his The Travels of Sir John Chardin in Persia and the Orient, 17th-century French traveler Jean Chardin wrote:[4] The Armenians have a way of roasting the mutton and lamb in their own skin upon the coals, as they do chestnuts.

When the mutton is dressed, they put the skin again upon it and sew it up well, and then they put it on the coals and cover it: the mutton is all night adoing, and it is not over and above good when it is done.In a scene from the 1976 Soviet film When September Comes, prominent Armenian actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan (Levon) makes khorovats with his grandson in the balcony of his daughter's Moscow apartment.

[5] Since 2009, an annual festival of khorovats has been held in Akhtala in northern Armenia.