Greek · Sauce
Tzatziki
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, aromatics blooming from the first bite, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 400g full-fat Greek yogurt
- 1 cucumber, grated, salted, and strangled dry
- 2 garlic cloves, grated
- 2 tbsp olive oil, splash red wine vinegar
- Dill or mint
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Salt the grated cucumber 10 min, then squeeze in a towel until it gives up. 10 min
- Fold everything into the yogurt.
- Rest 30 min: the garlic needs time to bloom. 30 min
- Trench of olive oil on top to serve.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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