Sweet Tzatziki? What the heck is that? This recipe is more of a failure than something new and amazing but I'll take more about that at the end.
It was a nice afternoon and while looking in the kitchen for a snack, I noticed that I still had a bunch of naan bread and I thought it would be nice to go with a dip. I could have went for a store bought dip but it was the Holiday Monday so I decided to try making a Tzatziki.
Ingredients:
3 - Cups Plain Greek Yogurt
3 - Tbsp Lemon Juice (or juice of one lemon)
2 - Garlic Clove, minced
1 - Large English Cucumber, diced (the long, skinny ones)
1 - Tbsp Salt (for salting cucumbers)
1.5 - Tbsp Fresh Dill
Directions:
Peel cucumbers, dice and sprinkle with the teaspoon of salt (draws water out). The first recipe I saw said to spin the cucumber in a Colander to get out some of the water. Tried it and it didn't work. It just added to my dish pile. (Read "Skip the Colander Step")
Spread the cucumber out on a baking sheet, covered between paper towels.
Paper towel on top.
Put another baking sheet on top and press down to squeeze out the juices. Another thing I though of just now is that you could try to squeeze out the juices in your hands over a strainer. I have to do that with spinach when making my spinach dip.
This is what it should look like after you've been pressing it for a bit.
Chop up the Dill.
And the Garlic.
Get out the Lemon Juice.
Add the Dill, Garlic, Lemon Juice, Salt and Pepper to a Food Processor.
Notice anything funny about that last picture? I didn't have the blade in so when I put the cucumber in next, I couldn't put the blade back in. I dumped the contents into another bowl (more dishes), put the blade back in the food processor and then poured everything back into the food processor.
Process until smooth.
This is where things started to go wrong. All the recipes I looked at before called for 3 cups of Greek Yogurt. In my efforts to balance price with fat percentage I ended up grabbing the "Vanilla" flavored Greek Yogurt instead of Plain.
And the second mistake was that I only bought one package, 2 Cups, instead of 3 Cups worth so now I was short Yogurt.
Put the Yogurt into a large bowl.
Mix the processed mixture and yogurt together to get a nice creamy thick consistency. Or in my cause, without enough yogurt, it's a runny mess :(
Then comes the fun part, Tasting! Because the Vanilla flavor was so strong in that yogurt, it completely over powered the dip with a sweet, almost treat like taste. I have to admit that the Tzatziki undertones were really good so I can tell that if I had made this properly, it would have been really good! I'm going to try making it again but this time I will use the right amount and right kind of yogurt and try to squeeze the cucumbers out a bit more.
They can't all be amazing recipes, I guess I'll add this one to the Cooking Fail pile but I will post an update once I try making it again to see if it's actually good when made properly. Or if anyone else gives it a shot and it works out, then please post about it in the comments.
