Gyroscopic Monkey

The title of this post will only be immediately comprehensible to my mother.  For anyone else reading, by way of background (though not an adequate explanation by any stretch), many, many years ago,  there was either a news article or perhaps a note adjacent to the related exhibit at the Exploratorium, that was about monkeys testing gyroscopes.  My dad decided this was a good nickname for me.  It wasn’t even the weirdest one he’d chosen (the Bengali for “drunken sea lion” probably wins that, though there were  innumerable contenders).  Cut to now, when the main pet name I call my husband is of the simian persuasion, and he particularly loved the gyros I made for dinner…. So, this title works on… well, two rather strange levels, but there you are.

Now, about those gyros.  I love mall gyros in the U.S.  The springy, crispity, salty, savory mystery meat filling; the creamy, garlicky sauce; the puffy pita enrobing them– it’s totally yummalicious to me.   And so when I accidentally came across this:  http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/06/greek-american-lamb-gyros-recipe.html, well, I knew it had to happen.

It seemed to start ok– lamb is tougher to find here, so I figured minced goat would be fine, and I got 500gms, which is about a pound.  Last night I decided to do the salt/pepper/oregano to let the meat hang out.  I read the recipe quickly, and somehow, 2 teaspoons of table salt in the written recipe appeared, to my eyes, as… 2 tablespoons of salt.  Which is SIX teaspoons.  Which would have been inedible in a pound of meat.

Grateful that a re-read of the recipe today let me catch the error, I figured the solution would be to add more ground meat.  There, I was in luck, as our commissary got in a shipment of frozens, and I was able to pick up a 1.2 pound package of redacted.  (If my tongue-in-cheek use of that confuses you, read up on the meat that the state in which I’m resident has banned.)  I let it partially defrost, and when I got home, I blitzed 2 onions, a few garlic cloves, more fresh oregano, ground black pepper, the overly salted ground goat, and this new semi-frozen mince all in the food processor.  I left out the bacon as I already had too much salt, and I used meat with a slightly higher fat content than the recipe, so I figured it would work.  From my reading, very cold is ideal for the mince blitz, so the partial defrost made sense.  I pureed it to a very gluey consistency, and let it sit for an hour for the salt to permeate, if not fully cure, the whole batch.  Then I kept an ice cube on standby to gently moisten my hands, and patted out a rectangular loaf as per the recipe.  I cooked it for 35 minutes at 300F.  Not much juice seemed to escape, and I let it rest.

I freelanced on the sauce– a small single-serve container of plain Greek yogurt, almost as much mayo, juice of a small local lemon, 2 1/2 cloves of garlic in the microplane, bit of salt, and dried parsley and mint.  Very, very, very good.  I peeled and cut a cucumber into lengths and then quarters, and also cut a roma tomato into longish chunks.

I sliced the (very springy) gyro loaf and then broiled for about 3 minutes per side (I was impatient and didn’t let the broiler get hot enough before popping it in– be mindful of how quickly stuff can burn, and keep a close watch if it’s actually up to broiler temp!).  I loaded up store-bought pita wrap with the fillings and added foil for ease of eating, photogenic-ness, and to re-create the mall feel:

I still have half the loaf in my freezer, so I can defrost, slice, broil, and have this meal again, which will, I think, suit my monkey mate.  He enjoyed the gyros even more than I did– I was irritated by the slight over-saltiness which I brought upon us through my silly misreading, and I tend to prefer less salt, in any case.  I compensated with extra sauce, so it all worked out.  Onward and upward.