Tzatziki
Every Gyro Needs a Good Sauce
Time: 3 Hours
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Difficulty: 2/5
This was the next thing I made in preparation form my homemade beef gyros. Sure, the meat is probably the most important part of the sandwich, but the sauce takes it to the next level. This recipe also comes from the Zaytinya Cookbook.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
The only ingredient I had trouble finding was Labneh. I had to go to Whole Foods to find it. The English cucumber was easy to find, but keep in mind that some places call them hot house cucumbers instead. If you can’t find labneh, I think you can just use more greek yogurt.
Tools:
Sharp Knife
Bowl
Cooking Review:
Prep Garlic: 48 Minutes
One of the ingredients for this recipe is confit garlic, which is actually a whole other recipe. It calls for two heads of garlic peeled and trimmed, so that’s why it took so long. I also went ahead and chopped the dill and mint.
Confit Garlic: 1 hour 4 minutes
I put the garlic in a small saucepan and added enough olive oil to cover the garlic. I heated the oil until it just started to simmer before lowering the heat to low and cooking for an hour. The garlic was strained from the oil and set aside for later.
Chop & salt cucumber: 1 hour
I chopped the cucumber and put in in a bowl to be tossed with salt. I let the cucumber sit in the salt for about an hour before putting it in a towel and squeezing out as much water as possible.
Mix Sauce: 14 minutes
I used a fork to mash up 3 cloves of the confit garlic before adding in the greek yogurt and labneh. I mixed them together and folded in the cucumber followed by the chipped herbs. Finally, I seasoned the tzatziki with salt & pepper.
Analysis:
It definitely tastes like tzatziki, just with less garlic pungency. If I remember correctly, tzatziki is pretty garlic forward, but this has a more mellow garlic flavor. The herbs come through nicely against the tanginess of the yogurt and labneh, and the texture is overall pretty smooth and creamy. I’m going to give this a 7/10. It’s pretty easy and can be done fairly quickly if you already have the confit garlic. It’s really up to your preference if you’d like this more than the store bough versions.
