Monday, August 22, 2011

Tsatsiki

As you might know I’ve been to Greece a while back and I’m going to have to admit that one of my favourite Greek dishes is tsatsiki. I’m not sure if it’s counted as a side dish or a salad or something altogether different, but I love it and that’s what counts. I’ve made it several times before, or someone in the family has done, but I looked up recipes and it seems we’ve been doing it wrong. We ended up with cucumber salad rather than tsatsiki. Hopefully the real Greeks won’t laugh at me! From the recipes I’ve found, basically here’s what you end up with to make real tsatsiki:

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Ingredients:
1 small cucumber
1-2 garlic cloves
250 ml Greek yoghurt
2 spoons (olive) oil


1. Start with grating the cucumber and draining all the juice from it.
2. Chop the garlic cloves.
3. Add all the ingredients in one bowl and done! Decorate with some basil leaves.

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A note on the garlic: the more garlic you add, obviously, the more garlic you’ll taste. Also try to keep in mind however that the longer you leave the tsatsiki (in the fridge for instance) the more garlic you will taste as well. I’m not quite sure how this works, but it works for every recipe with garlic in it!
I tried the tsatsiki again yesterday and added walnut oil. However, it really didn’t make a good match. I feel using any special oils will be wasted on tsatsiki, unless it’s perhaps garlic or basil oil. If you dislike the taste of the oil, just add more Greek yoghurt. I’m not entirely sure how much yoghurt I used the first time, but it’s somewhere between 250 and 500 ml. In case you don't have any Greek yoghurt at all, adding normal yoghurt with a few spoons mayonnaise will do the trick too.

Note: I've already been told off for my spelling! Apparently it's not tzaziki, but tsatsiki, although I've found translations of tzatziki and even tzadziki. The Greeks I know however didn't say anything bad about my recipe. They mentioned it looked good!

2 comments:

  1. It looks very beautiful, like a tree in a pot and good health.

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  2. Aww, thank you! I hadn't even thought of it like that! ^^

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