Gyro: the progress report

Not bad.

Not great, to be sure: the lamb and beef are both lean, which makes for dry meat. But when you stuff the dead animal in a pita along with chunks of feta, some tomatoes, some onion, and my so-so tzatziki sauce, you get... something edible. I won't be ashamed to feed this to my students tomorrow, though I doubt any self-respecting New Yorker would like what I've done.

I think an artificial solution to the juiciness problem might be to bring along some tin foil, put flattened patties into the foil along with dabs of olive oil, and cook the foil-wrapped meat en papillote style.

Suggestions within the next eight or ten hours are welcome. It's 2am here; I'm going to sleep, waking up at 8am, heading off for morning classes, then coming back home around 12:30 to grab my food items and go back to class. I'll check my email to see whether any suggestions have come in. They have to be of the "quick and dirty" sort, as I'll have only about 15 minutes to implement them while I'm at the dorm. Keep in mind that my only equipment at school will be a gas range-- no oven, and no rotisserie.

(Another possibility occurred to me: I could try cooking the meat on a much lower flame. I had cranked it up to "high" in order to get a quick result, but that may have inadvertently dried everything out. Or maybe not: the meat cooked in about a minute; there simply wasn't much juice coming out of it to begin with.)


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