Last summer in Germersheim, a small German town, I tasted some of the best tzatziki I ever had. At Sto Kastro, a Greek restaurant along the Rhine, the garlicky yogurt sauce was a mere dollop on a much larger gyro plate loaded with fries, yet it carried the dish, as good tzatziki is wont to do. Each bite refreshed the palate, letting me eat more of the rich lamb and potatoes. What made the sauce special, too, was its clean cucumber flavor and smooth, thick texture, the way it sat on the plate rather than pooled. It was totally different from other tzatzikis I’d eaten in America and in Greece, where my fiancé and I traveled next for a friend’s wedding.
Recipe: Tangy Tzatziki
According to Ursula Heinzelmann, a German food writer and historian, tzatziki is a relatively recent arrival to Germany. In the mid-1950s, to fill a labor shortage, Germany started recruiting workers from neighboring countries. They would go on to open döner stands, Italian pizzerias, Balkan grills and Greek tavernas, restaurants that became fixtures, especially in smaller towns where there wasn’t much variety. My fiancé, who grew up near Germersheim in the 1990s, was raised on the occasional spread of moussaka and tzatziki cooked by his German mother, who frequented those tavernas as a child. For years, he assumed tzatziki was German.
During our weeklong stay in this southeastern part of rural Germany, I saw tzatziki at every backyard barbecue. Where there was a grill, there was tzatziki. You could also buy it at any big-box supermarket. But unless you’re desperately strapped for time, I implore you to make it yourself at home, from scratch, not least because the recipe is so simple and tastes best fresh. That curious but stellar tzatziki in Germersheim inspired this version, which lets the cucumber and yogurt shine. All you need are garlic, cucumbers and Greek yogurt. (I’ll assume you already have salt and vinegar on hand.)
You don’t need me to tell you that for such a pared-down dish, each ingredient doesn’t just count — it’s the difference between the ordinary and the ethereal. Greek-style strained yogurt is essential, and the higher the fat content, the better the dairy flavor. When the journalist and food writer Aglaia Kremezi was growing up in Athens in the late 1960s, a yogurt man (akin to a milkman) would deliver fresh, local sheep and goat’s milk yogurt right to her door. Back then, she says, you had to strain your own yogurt for dishes like tzatziki, because mass-produced strained “Greek” yogurt wasn’t as readily available.
I’ve found that even store-bought Greek yogurt can be strained further: You could hang it in a cheesecloth or, to expedite things, just wrap it in a clean kitchen towel and wring the living daylights out of it.
You may be tempted to add more grated garlic. Don’t. It’s intensity builds with time.
The type of cucumber matters, too, of course, as it lends half of the tzatziki’s flavor. I’m not ordinarily precious about my food shopping, but in the summer, I find myself waiting patiently until Saturday morning to buy in-season Persian cucumbers at the farmers’ market, yogurt waiting in the fridge. Unlike their larger, more bitter counterparts, like Kirby or English (sometimes referred to as hot house), Persian cucumbers don’t need to be peeled, and their sweet flesh tastes of cucumber times a thousand.
Suzy Karadsheh remembers accompanying her father to the open-air market, or souk, in the coastal city Port Said, Egypt, to shop for food as a major part of the summer eating experience.
In her most recent cookbook, “The Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner,” Karadsheh provides her go-to tzatziki recipe, which she adapted from Cheryl Sternman Rule’s cookbook “Yogurt Culture.” Karadsheh’s recipe taught me two things: to blitz cucumbers in a food processor rather than grate them, which both makes the dip taste more of the fruit and turns it a gorgeous pale green; and to use white distilled vinegar, not lemon juice, for acid. You may be tempted to add more grated garlic, but its intensity will build over time, then mellow out and permeate the entire batch of tzatziki with its allium savoriness.
Whenever I eat this — with warm pita bread or chips, Cheez-Its or fresh crunchy vegetables — I’m reminded of how my fiancé and I couldn’t stop talking about that German tzatziki while driving along the cliffs of the Peloponnese to my friend’s wedding, watching the sun set into Homer’s “wine-dark sea.”
Eric Kim has been a food and cooking columnist for The Times since 2021. You can find his recipes on New York Times Cooking.
The post A Tzatziki With More Heft and Punch appeared first on New York Times.
