Simple Cooking - Tzatziki and Pita

By Anthony Todd in Food on Apr 1, 2009 5:00PM

We must’ve ordered this dish a hundred times at our favorite Greek restaurant, but we never thought to see if we could do it at home. This tart, garlicky spread is a great appetizer or snack; it keeps for at least a week and tastes great spread on bread, tortilla chips or vegetables. Our recipe come from the Parthenon Cookbook, which is a great buy - full of very basic recipes for Greek classics. It takes a little bit of time to drain the yogurt and marinate the flavors in the dip, but the actual work is pretty light and the result is worth the effort.

A note on yogurt. We used normal, plain grocery store yogurt. It worked, but the results weren’t perfect. If you can get Greek yogurt, use that instead. If you can’t, just add extra vinegar and salt to the final product.

Tzatziki and Pita
Adapted from The Parthenon Cookbook

1 large container of plain yogurt
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
½ a cucumber, peeled, seeded and finely chopped
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
Salt
Pepper
¼ cup Olive Oil
Pitas for serving

First, drain the yogurt. To do this, line a colander or sieve with a clean kitchen towel. Place the colander in a larger bowl (see the picture) and put the yogurt inside the colander. Refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. When you come back, you should find that the yogurt has thickened and released plenty of liquid into the bowl. Discard the liquid and scrape out the yogurt. Wash your towel immediately.

In a medium sized mixing bowl, combine the drained yogurt, garlic, cucumber and red wine vinegar. While stirring, add the olive oil. Cover, refrigerate and let sit a few hours or overnight.

When you are ready to serve the dip, put some pitas on a lightly oiled griddle or in a frying pan. Let them sit for about 3 minutes on each side, until warmed through and lightly browned. Cut into wedges. Serve pitas with dip, red onions, parsley, lemon juice, lettuce leaves or anything else you want to add!