I love street food. The simpler the better. A good souvlaki is something very difficult to find outside of Greece. The souvlaki has often been called the Hamburger of Greece – and with good reason. You can find a souvlaki at almost any eatery and on almost every street corner. It is the de-facto fast food of Greece.

For some time now I’ve been in a quest to make the perfect souvlaki at home from scratch and I believe I have succeeded. Some of the ingredients are ready made – and I’ll be working on making these from scratch in a future post. These ingredients being the traditional pocketless Greek pita bread, the meat seasoning, and the Greek style strained yoghurt.

Here are the steps:

Firstly you need some meat. Lamb is best. In Greece, pork is often used as it is less expensive. You can also find alternatives such as chicken souvlaki, ground beef or lamb souvlaki, or even more exotic varieties. For me, the ultimate souvlaki is made with lamb shoulder. It is best if your lamb shoulder is cut into thin chops which makes them easier to grill to perfection. You can optionally cut the meat in small cubes and put them on a skewer, but is just an added step which I do not believe to be necessary. Remember, souvlaki meat needs to be cooked until well done and crispy! You want a good bit of fat on your meat, not something ultra lean. The fat will help keep the meat moist, and in combination with the salt and spices, will go nice and crispy.

Second you will need to spice the meat with some good quality oregano. I use wild Greek oregano dried on the vine which I get from Greece. If you can find any sort of Greek oregano, use that! Otherwise, any good quality oregano will suffice.

Next pour some nice fresh squeezed lemon juice, and a good helping of the oregano on the meat. Mix it up well and allow to marinade for several hours.

How you cook your meat is one of the most important parts of the whole process. This is best done on a BBQ or grill. Firstly, you need to cook the meat very well, and it needs to be generously seasoned. I use a generic seasoning called ‘Season-All‘. It is basically just salt, and a mix of other spices. I plan to concoct my own seasoning mix – but until then use Season-All or equivalent. If you don’t have anything like this available, the Season-All ingredients are:

Salt, Paprika (4%), Chilli Pepper, Dried Onion, Black Pepper (3%), Garlic Powder, Celery Seed, Nutmeg, Coriander Seed, Paprika , Cayenne Pepper

As per most ingredients list, they are listed in descending order by weight.

Be sure to GENEROUSLY season both sides of the meat. The picture below shows the meat in the middle of the cooking stage. Technically, looking at this picture, the meat is cooked – but it is not quite cooked enough for a souvlaki! Souvlaki meat needs to be very well cooked – until it is almost crispy. It needs constant turning on the grill to avoid flare-ups, and avoid burning – think of it as almost being like a rotisserie – except you are doing it by hand. As the meat cooks, you will be turning it over more and more frequently until it is done. The way to know if it is done is if after turning it, you see the lamb is almost ‘foamy’ so to speak as the fat bubbles away on the surface of the meat. If as you turn the meat several times you see this ‘foam’ on both sides then the meat is done

When the meat is properly and fully cooked, it should look something like this. If your Chops have been cut particularly thick, and the inside of the meat is pink, or not fully well done right through, cut the meat off the bone, chop it up into bits, and fry it in a hot pan with some Greek olive oil to crisp it all up. The meat will need to be cut off the bone, and chopped into smaller pieces before assembling your souvlaki.

Next step is the pita bread. When your meat is cooked, put it aside and allow it to rest. While this is happening you can give your pita breads a bit of a toast. Ideally you should give one side of your pita bread a very light coating of olive oil, but you can skip this step if you want. You should give it a nice toasting on the BBQ grill though – let it go a little crispy on the outside, but still fluffy on the inside and pliable enough to wrap.

These pitas are imported from Greece. Nothing I’ve found in the UK matches the pocketless feature, the chewy texture, and the aroma and flavour of these pitas. I shall be trying to develop a recipe and method for this in the future. If you cannot find this kind of flatbread, you can use a regular pita bread as a substitute – or if you have a bakery or shop that sells middle-eastern foods, they may have something like a laffa which is a middle eastern style flatbread. These tend to be massive though – so you can cut them up in 4 to make a regular sized souvlaki.

Before we assemble the Souvlaki, we need to prepare our garnishes. The most traditional being fresh ripe tomatoes, nice sweet pink onions, some Greek style yoghurt or tzatziki sauce. The tomatoes should be very sweet and ripe. In this instance I used baby plum tomatoes. The onions too are very important. You should use sweet pink onions rather than the typical red onion, or Spanish yellow onion which are quite pungent and strong. A suitable substitute would be shallots if you can find them, otherwise, use red onion. Sweet pink onions are very difficult to find. Here in the UK, I find them at Asian grocers where they call them Bombay Onions. Apparently they are imported from india, and appear to be the same kind of sweet salad onions you get in Greece, though I believe much of the onion crop sold in Greece comes from Egypt.

Finally, with all the preparations done, it is time to assemble our souvlaki!

There is not much to it really – a picture paints 1000 words. Spread a tablespoon or two of the Greek strained Yoghurt. I use Total which is imported from Greece – it can be found all over Europe, and even in the US. Any Greek style strained yoghurt should do though, but it will never taste as authentic as Total! Spread some of your garnishes, and if you REALLY want to have an authentic street style souvlaki, add a few fried potatoes too!

Keep in mind that every region, and even every city has their own way of garnishing a Souvlaki. In the north of Greece, i’ve heard they use mustard and ketchup! Other areas use a yellow turmeric based sauce, many (particularly in Athens) use Tzatziki sauce. Personally I like it the Cretan way – from the town of Hania – which is is just a big dollop of plain strained yoghurt.

Cut your meat off the bone, and chop it into small pieces – add this to your souvlaki.

All you have to do next is wrap the pita up, and if you really want to look authentic, wrap that in wax paper for that real street-food look!

As you can see, it’s not difficult – the real flavour comes with the authenticity and quality of the ingredients.

Of course, you will want to wash it all down with a nice beverage. Living in Britain means I have a choice of many fine ales!