BigHominid's tzatziki recipe

I normally make my tzatziki by feel, and I can't vouch that what I'm making is authentic. In my previous food-related post, I talked about how I handle the cucumbers—by mincing them into little cubes, not by shredding them in a grater. If you make your sauce my way, you can skip the step where you drain the cukes of water before incorporating them into the yogurt, and the resulting sauce is, I think, fresher and crunchier. Another area of conflict revolves around whether or not to add dill to your tzatziki. I add dill. Period. It ain't tzatziki without the dill, as far as I'm concerned, and dill pairs up nicely with lamb. Follow this recipe, and you'll be rewarded with a good, solid sauce.

INGREDIENTS

one container of yogurt (Greek preferred, but regular is okay), 400-ish grams
one cucumber (I use longish Korean cukes—see pic below)
salt (use sparingly: too much salt will draw water out of the cukes)
pepper to taste

1 slightly heaping tsp. fresh-ground garlic (or 1/2 tsp. powdered garlic)

olive oil (by feel, but about 2-3 tbsp.)

lemon juice, 1-2 tsp.

dried or fresh dill to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Plop yogurt into a large-enough bowl (so you can stir as you add ingredients).

2. Cut off the extreme ends of your cucumber. (Optional: using a vegetable peeler, peel away strips of skin along the cuke's long axis to create a striped effect.) Cut the cuke in half lengthwise, then scoop out the seeds with a spoon, leaving nothing but the firm flesh.

3. Dice the cuke into small cubes no more than a quarter-inch (0.65 cm) per side. Toss the cubes into the yogurt. These will provide the sauce with some chunkiness.

4. Add salt and pepper. Be stingy with the salt: too much salt will cause the water inside the cuke to come out, making your sauce watery. Go nuts with the pepper if you want, but it shouldn't be your dominant seasoning.

5. Add garlic and lemon juice. Be careful here, too: too much lemon juice can make the sauce too tart. I use one of those cheap squeeze bottles of lemon juice, and I shoot that out for maybe a second—certainly no more than two seconds. If you're using an actual lemon, maybe about half a lemon's worth of juice ought to be enough. Use more if needed.

6. Add olive oil, which gives the sauce a little body and a subtle undercurrent. 2-3 tablespoons ought to be enough. Reminder: as you add each of the ingredients, give the sauce a good stir to incorporate before moving on.

7. Lastly, add the dill to taste. For me, that means at least a teaspoon of dried dill, but your taste may vary. To me, dill is the signature taste in tzatziki, and it only gets better over time as the flavors in the sauce have a chance to marry.

8. NB: adjust ingredients as necessary! This is very important! Amounts shown above are rough estimates. Get a feel for the sauce as you make it.

Tzatziki works best with lamb, but try it on beef, various types of whitefish, and other forms of seafood, like crab cakes. Use it as a sauce on a Greek-themed burger that also has feta crumbles, tomatoes, red onions, and fresh cucumber, like a Greek salad. (Season the burger patty with Greek seasonings, too!)

VISUAL AIDS

Greek yogurt (400 g)—but regular yogurt is also okay

Korean cucumbers

fresh-ground garlic

olive oil

salt & pepper

lemon juice

dill, both dried and fresh

Why not shred the cukes with a grater? Because the grater shreds the cell walls of the vegetable, releasing a ton of water. Cutting with a knife, by contrast, releases far less water. This is why the people who shred their cukes have to do the extra step of squeezing the shredded veggies to get rid of all that water. I like cubing because, by cubing the cukes, you preserve the water inside the tissues of the cucumber, resulting in a fresher taste (and superior crunch) without the nasty consistency of a watery tzatziki or the more boring consistency of tzatziki containing waterless cucumber.