I was excited to read about another great recipe to try on my friend Heather's blog Out of the Box and Into the Kitchen - Gyros Burgers...
Our family is a huge fan of the real authentic gyros, shaved pressed lamb and beef, grilled and served with tzatziki sauce and other additions... so I thought we'd try these...
and even before I could try them, I recommended them to my cousin who was looking for an interesting supper choice too! They really liked them so it redoubled my resolve to make this recipe...
But, I also learned that the burgers were hard to keep in the pitas, and so modified our meal to be cooked ground beef (like you would for tacos or meat sauce) rather than formed burgers... this also appealed to me because I could better control just how cooked the meat was... and being pregnant, this was important to me!
Here is the original recipe from Heather's site with my modifications in Red:
Gyro Burgers
1 lb ground beef(or ground turkey)
1/2 onion, diced
3/4 tsp oregano
2 cups plain yogurt (I used Greek Yogurt - easy to find these days at most supermarkets)
2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp onion powder
2 tsp dried chives (I had fresh, so I used fresh instead)
2 tsp dried parsley
1/4 tsp ground pepper (We like pepper so used 1/2 tsp instead)
1/2 tsp salt (I omitted the salt completely)
1 cucumber, seeded, peeled,chopped (We only needed 1/2 a cucumber)
pita (we used Greek flat bread pita - most authentic...)
mozzerella cheese (we used crumbled Feta instead for a more authentic taste)
tomatoes - for topping
spinach leaves - for topping
Mix one cup of yogurt with seasonings(except oregano). Place half the mixture in with meat, oregano, and onions. Mix meat together and form patties , grill until done to your likeness (As I said, I just pan sautéed the meat rather than make patties. Take the rest of the yogurt and mix it with the cucumber and 1 cup of plain yogurt to make the sauce. Stir and place in fridge. Once burgers are done, place in pitas and top with sauce. I steamed the pitas in the microwave with a damp paper towel for 30 seconds before placing the sauce onto the pita and then scooping meat, tomato, cheese etc onto it. The nice thing about the ground meat rather than the patty was you could control how much you wanted...
These weren't quite as good as authentic gyros... they lacked the slow cooked meat flavor, but were good none-the-less and we will make them again!
