A staple in Greek and Turkish cuisine, tzatziki is a sauce or dip made with Greek-style yoghurt, cool cucumber, punchy garlic, zingy lemon and fresh herbs.
Fantastic with breads, as part of a mezze, or with grilled meats and salad, tzatziki offers refreshing balance to your meal, and is a brilliant way to use up leftover yoghurt, too. For a step-by-step guide on how to make tzatziki, take a look at Leyla Kazim’s top tips.
Once you’ve got that covered, check out our favourite ways to use tzatziki, and bring a bit of The Med to your kitchen.
This Greek-inspired family dish from Jamie’s latest cookbook, 5 Ingredients Mediterranean, combines tzatziki-marinated chicken, pan-juice rice, jammy onions and roasted lemons. The yoghurt in the tzatziki has a natural acidity that makes it ideal for marinades, helping to carry flavour and break down the proteins in meat.
JAMIE SAYS:
“It’s untraditional used like this, but I can totally vouch for its deliciousness and ability to tenderise meat.”
A stand-out combo of spicy chicken, veg-packed couscous and homemade tzatziki, this colourful recipe from Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals is a fantastic mid-week meal. Punchy olives, zesty lemon, creamy feta and loads of fresh herbs ramp up the flavour, and bashing the chicken out until nice and thin will help to speed up the cooking time. Win-win!
Tzatziki is good friends with grilled and roasted meats, especially juicy lamb chops. Serve it up with a crunchy fattoush salad – a combination of torn pitta, cooling cucumber, ripe tomatoes, sweet lettuce and refreshing mint – for a bonus hit of fresh, summer flavour.
With gorgeously tender flesh and crispy skin, salmon pairs wonderfully with a dollop of zingy tzatziki. This gorgeous recipe from Jamie at Home celebrates the barbecue for a proper Med-inspired alfresco vibe.
JAMIE SAYS:
“When barbecued salmon skin is all smoky and crispy like this, it’s as good as pork crackling.”
If you fancy a proper Greek pork kebab recipe, look no further than this cracking pork souvlaki recipe from Jamie Does… Marinated pork is threaded onto skewers and grilled until sizzling, then stuffed into warm flatbreads with charred red peppers and a dollop of tzatziki to balance it all out. What more could you want?
For a vegan kebab recipe idea, simply blitz courgettes, chickpeas, fresh mint, garlic and toasted spices and shape into little vegan koftes. This recipe uses a vegan yoghurt dip, made with soy yoghurt, but you could swap it out with regular yoghurt tzatziki, if you like. Stuff it all into a pitta with a homemade cashew and peanut sauce, and dig in!
Flavourful lamb stands up well to heavy, fragrant spices, like these Yemeni-inspired lamb lollipops from Jamie’s Great Britain. Cumin, coriander, chilli and garlic are rubbed all over lamb cutlets and left to mix and mingle overnight, then griddled until sizzling and golden.
JAMIE SAYS:
“Ask your butcher for extra long lamb cutlets, untrimmed, so you have big Captain Caveman-style chops to gnaw on.”
Serve it up with tzatziki and a spicy tomato dip.
When it comes to Greek cuisine, you can never have too much grilled lamb. This time, chunks of tender lamb are marinated in a fennel and wild garlic paste, then threaded onto rosemary skewers, ready for the barbecue. A great recipe to get the kids involved with, and it tastes incredible!
Find out more about Jamie’s book 5 Ingredient Mediterranean and bag yourself a copy
