Sometime last winter, we made a Sandra Lee recipe for Greek Lamb Burgers. The burgers tasted like a gyro and the recipe included directions to make tzatziki sauce. Out of all the things we have made, it was probably one of my favorite dishes.
Last night, we got together for another cooking night. We came up with the idea to make Gyro Pizza. Although the recipe isn't 100% original, we tried to put our own spin on the dishes components.
The Ingredients(amounts should make about 6 pizzas and leave you with some extra tzatziki sauce for dipping!)
Flat bread. We ended up buying 2 packages with 5 flat breads in each bag.
Fresh Mozzarella, broken up into small chunks
Feta Cheese
Kalamata Olives
2 or 3 small tomatoes
1 onion, peeled
Olive oil
The Tzatziki Sauce:
2 17.6 oz containers FAGE Greek yogurt
2.5 or 3 medium cucumbers
Salt
Pepper
3 garlic Garlic
Fresh Dill
Fresh Mint
1/2 Lemon
Meat:
2-2.5 lbs of ground lamb (we used about 2.25 lbs)
Salt
Pepper
Garlic Powder
Greek Seasoning
Marjoram
3 or 4 garlic cloves (depending on how much garlic you like)
In a mixing bowl, combine yogurt, juice from the lemon, garlic (minced), salt, and pepper. You do not need a lot of salt and pepper. A few shakes with the salt and pepper shakers should work. I accidently added a few extra shakes of pepper when I made the sauce, resulting in a very peppery tzatziki (Well, I shouldn't say accidently, I just told Julie that it was an accident--sorry Julie!)
Using a food processor, chop up the dill and mint. I used about 6 or 7 mint leaves and the dill off of a few stems. You can add as much or as little mint and dill as you would like. It all depends on how strong you want these flavors to be in the sauce. I would suggest starting with a lesser amount of these ingredients and if you feel the sauce needs more flavor, you can always add more.
Next thing to do is to deseed the cucumbers. Initially, I cut the cucumber in half and tried to spoon out the seeds. Julie saw what I was doing and looked pretty perplexed.
She suggested I first peel the cucumber, cut it length wise, and then take out the seeds! This was a great idea!
Into a mixing bowl, grate 2 cucumbers and drain the liquid out in a strainer.
Add the cucumber to the sauce and mix. Since we bought 3 cucumbers, and only grated two, we decided to peel 1/2 a cucumber, chopped it into chunks and add it to the sauce. This gave the sauce a great texture! If you want a chunkier sauce, you can always use an entire cucumber.
The next step is to prepare the meat. Combine the lamb, salt, pepper, garlic (minced), garlic powder, Greek seasoning and Marjoram in a mixing bowl. Although we didn't measure the Greek seasoning or Marjoram, you would want to be generous with the amount you use.
Cook the meat in a pot over the stove. Cook the meat until it is brown all the way through! Next, drain out all the liquid from the meat. After cooking the meat, we added more spices. Again, this is a preference thing, it all depends on how much flavor you want.
Chop up the onions and tomatoes and put them on a grill pan with a little bit of olive oil. We cooked the vegetables all the way through; however, if you want a bit more crunch to the dish, do not cook the vegetables as much.
After all this prep work, its finally time to add construct our pizza's! (after this point, we forgot to take pictures...sorry!!)
Lay out the flat breads and spread some tzatziki on it (just like you would with pizza sauce). Spread some ground lamb, chopped up olives, feta cheese, the broken up pieces of mozzarella cheese and vegetables on the pizza.
Once the pizza is constructed, carefully place the pizza's on the grill for about 5-10 minutes. The goal here is to simply brown the flat bread and heat up the pizza. Take the pizza's off the grill and eat!
I have to say, out of all the dishes I have made, this one is probably my favorite!
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