Tzatziki

A dip with a long written record

Tzatziki is a family of cold yogurt preparations rather than one fixed recipe. Its base is strained or diluted yogurt, mixed with cucumber and garlic, seasoned with salt and olive oil, and usually sharpened with red wine vinegar or lemon juice. Depending on the version it is thick enough to scoop, as a dip, or thin enough to drink, as a soup. The Greek name is the Turkish cacık, which in turn is related to older Persian and Kurdish words for herbs.

The family reaches back well before the modern Greek dish. The Baghdadi cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, compiled in the tenth century, gives jājaq: yogurt salted and stirred with onion, garlic, herbs and cucumbers, and served with olive oil. A fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook gives the first recipe in which the yogurt is drained, the cucumber is salted and pressed, and the mixture is flavoured with fennel, mint and mastic. The food historian Nawal Nasrallah treats this as the forerunner of modern tzatziki, and the British scholar Daniel Newman reads jājaq as a cucumber salad dressed with curds and garlic.

In the Ottoman period yogurt condiments became a standard part of the meze table. The first printed Turkish use of cacık appears in Hoca Kâmil Pasha's Melceü't-Tabbâhîn of 1844, which describes it as yogurt with cucumber and garlic. Tarator, a word with wider reach through the Balkans and the Levant, names several related sauces, some of them with walnuts or tahini. Greek tzatziki descends from this Ottoman tradition, and the English word appears around the mid-twentieth century.

The etymology is not settled. Persian zhazh and Kurdish jaj are offered as roots, and one scholar, Sevan Nişanyan, derives the sauce sense of tarator from a Venetian word for cook. The sources read agree that the word came into Greek from Turkish, but none of them gives a dated Greek text that settles the route.

Why the yogurt is drained and the cucumber is salted

The main technical problem with tzatziki is water. Cucumber is mostly water, and the medieval recipes handle the moisture in two steps: the yogurt is hung in a sack until the whey drains, and the cucumber is salted and then squeezed before it goes into the yogurt. The thickness of a finished tzatziki therefore depends on how much whey has been removed from the yogurt and the cucumber, which is a method step, not an added thickener.

Garlic adds its sharp sulphur notes to the yogurt, and salt does two jobs at once: it seasons the sauce and, on the cucumber, pulls out water. Olive oil coats the surface and softens the sourness of the yogurt. Vinegar or lemon juice gives the acidity that lifts the dairy flavour; the sources read use red wine vinegar in the Greek version and lemon juice in the Cypriot one. The fresh herbs are added last, so that their colour and aroma stay bright.

Greek, Cypriot and Balkan versions

In Greece the usual form is strained yogurt, traditionally made from sheep or goat milk, with cucumber, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, dill, mint and parsley. It is served as a meze with bread, olives and fried vegetables, and as a sauce for souvlaki and gyros. A version with purslane (glistrida) may be called purslane and yogurt salad rather than tzatziki.

The Cypriot talatouri is closest to the Greek dish but leans on mint and lemon. Its cucumber is sliced, the garlic is minced, and the sauce is finished with dried mint, oregano or olive oil. In the Balkans the same family is called tarator. There it is often a thin, cold soup with dill and walnuts, served in summer; in Bulgaria a thicker Snezhanka, made with strained yogurt, cucumber, garlic, dill and oil, is a related dish.

In Iraq and parts of the Arab world a similar yogurt and cucumber salad is eaten with arak, and in Iran it is called mast-o-khiar. Each of these shares the yogurt and cucumber base, but the balance of herbs and the thickness vary by place and household.

Using it and reading the result

Tzatziki is served cold as a meze and as a sauce for souvlaki and gyros. The sources read do not describe how to judge texture or what causes a watery or grainy result, so this page records the method's two water-control steps and leaves the rest unstated.

Storage time and temperature are not established by the sources read for this page. No shelf life or safe holding time is given here; the sources read do not establish one.