Friday luncheon with gyros

Today's gyros were a hit. I got an "It's really good" from my boss, who normally only ever grunts, "It's good" when he's eating anything I make. My coworkers also enjoyed the meal, and they offered their compliments. Here's a shot of the first gyro I ate:

I surprised myself by eating only two gyros instead of my intended three. The flatbreads were small enough for me to eat three, but for whatever reason, I lost momentum and stopped at two. The wraps were quite delicious, though, so it's certainly not for lack of tastiness that I stopped. The tzatziki once again came out perfectly; I pride myself on doing a pretty good version of it. I rebel against certain cooks' advice to use a grater to shred the cucumbers; I think this is a wasteful mistake: it's better to use a spoon to de-seed the cukes, then to mince them finely into tiny cubes. Mincing disturbs the cell structure far less, and it also preserves the fresh, lively crunchiness of the cukes, i.e., you've created a good texture in your tzatziki. If you follow the path of the shredder, the shredding releases a ton of water from the cukes because you're ripping willy-nilly through the vegetables' cell structure. You're then supposed to gather the shredded cukes up in a cheesecloth or tea towel and squeeze the hell out of them, draining them of their precious life-fluids. Some claim this intensifies the flavor of the cukes; I counter-claim this nullifies the cukes' freshness and crunch. So, yes: I mince. As for the question of salted yogurt releasing the water of the minced cukes: I have never had a problem because I salt my tzatziki very modestly, and my method works every time. I made this particular batch of sauce Wednesday night; on Friday morning, as I was prepping the food before taking it to the office, I popped open the tzatziki to give it a check, and voilà: no pooled water. The sauce had held together exactly as intended. So, there.

I'm not sure why I'm rhapsodizing so much about a Greek-style yogurt-cuke-and-dill sauce. I guess it's a point of pride for me—one of the few things that I do perfectly in the kitchen—and consistently so. Other things that I do turn out slightly different every time, but with tzatziki, it's as if there were some karmic link—between me and the sauce—that guides my hand.

As you see in the pic below, we managed to finish off all the meat I had placed in the skillet, which was only half of the meat I had brought. (Wanna come over?) The tzatziki is mostly gone; I had obviously brought way too much red onion, and the tomatoes and lettuce weren't gobbled as extensively as I'd thought they'd be. There's some feta left over; we all agreed that the cheese was remarkably good: mild and creamy without being too sharp and tangy. I came to the office with 18 flatbreads; I'm not sure how many are left, but I think the supply was reduced by more than half. My Korean coworker grabbed an extra flatbread for himself to eat with some of the vegetables. Nice guy that he is, he let me build my second gyro with the meat that remained in the pan, although I guess I could have heated up another handful of meat, given that I had another kilo of it in a plastic storage box.

And here's my second gyro:

Forgot to mention that we invited the lady staffer two doors down from us to come and share in our meal. She's in her forties and very giggly, but she's also remarkably open-minded about foreign food. She had stopped by before when we were doing Tex-Mex, and she loved the food that day. Today, she came back with a clean plate and thanked me profusely. (I assume she didn't toss my meal in the trash!)

I'm always frustrated by how my phone camera can never pick up the details of the gyro meat itself. This is partly because I insist on cooking the meat until it's crispy on the outside, so it's always dark. But even when I try to offer you a closeup view—

—the meat is still too dark (and, alas, the pic is out of focus... again). Ah, well.

We also had bananas Foster, which my Korean coworker declared was gogeup-shik, i.e., haute cuisine. I smiled at that; despite being boozy, the dessert has never struck me as particularly posh. I didn't serve dessert until an hour had passed after the end of the main meal (my coworkers thanked me for that; they wanted time to digest). The boss observed that the dessert was very sweet, but I don't think he was complaining: he ate his share. Sorry for the lack of bananas-Foster pics, but you've seen this dessert before.

So that was lunch. It was strangely satisfying, even if I didn't eat my third gyro. I still don't have the texture of the meat quite right, but I'll keep working on it.