Souvlaki
Pork shoulder, not loin, and lemon added to the marinade at the end rather than the start. Hours in acid turns the surface of the meat chalky.
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Resting
- 4 hr 10 min
- Total
- 4 hr 50 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Marinade
Tzatziki
To serve
Method
Marinade
Cut the pork shoulder into even 3cm cubes, leaving the fat on.
Shoulder rather than loin. Souvlaki is cooked hard and fast over high heat, and loin is lean enough to go dry in the time it takes to char; shoulder has fat running through it and stays succulent.
Toss the pork with the oil, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper, cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.
Add the lemon juice only in the last 30 minutes.
Acid does not tenderise meat over long periods — it denatures the surface proteins, and after a few hours in lemon juice the outside of the pork goes opaque and chalky in a way that never fully recovers. Thirty minutes gives all the flavour and none of the damage.
Tzatziki
Make the tzatziki: squeeze the grated cucumber hard in a clean tea towel until no more water comes out, then stir it into the yogurt with the garlic, oil, vinegar and dill.
Squeeze it properly. Unsqueezed cucumber turns tzatziki into a watery pool within the hour.
To serve
Thread the pork onto skewers, four or five cubes each, pushed together but not compressed.
Heat a griddle pan or barbecue until very hot and cook the skewers for 12 to 15 minutes, turning every 3 minutes, until charred in patches and 71C at the centre.
Warm the pittas for 30 seconds a side in the same pan while the meat rests for 3 minutes.
Fill each pitta with tzatziki, tomato, red onion and the pork pushed off its skewer.
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What to expect
- Taste
Garlic, oregano and charred pork fat, cut sharply by lemon and by the sour cool of the tzatziki. Very direct and quite salty.
- Aroma
Oregano hitting a hot griddle, which is one of the more evocative smells in this collection.
- Texture
Charred outside, juicy inside, against a soft warm pitta and a cool thick sauce. The temperature contrast is half of it.
- Sound
Fat dripping and catching on the griddle.
- How the flavour moves
Char and salt first, then the pork, then garlic and lemon, then the cool sour finish of the yogurt.
- Serve it
Hot meat, warm bread, cold tzatziki, all at once and deliberately.
- Goes with
A Greek salad, chips, and a cold beer. Nothing complicated.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Low. Pork shoulder is cheap.
- Equipment
Skewers, a griddle pan or a barbecue, and a clean tea towel for the cucumber.
- When to make it
A barbecue, or a weeknight with the marinade started the night before.
- Best season
None, though it belongs to summer by temperament.
- You know it is done when
Charred in patches rather than evenly browned, with the fat rendered and catching.
- And it feels like
Juicy and yielding. Chalky and dry means either loin was used or the lemon went in too early.
- Food safety
71C/160F at the centre of a cube, or 63C with a rest. Marinade that has held raw pork goes in the bin, not over the cooked meat. Wooden skewers should be soaked for 30 minutes so they do not burn.
- Where it goes wrong
- Lemon in the marinade from the start, which is the main fault.
- Pork loin, which dries out before it chars.
- Cubes packed tight on the skewer, so the sides steam instead of colouring.
- Unsqueezed cucumber in the tzatziki, which turns it to water.
- A griddle that is not hot enough, so the pork greys rather than chars.
- Cold pitta, which cracks.
- If it does go wrong
Chalky: the lemon went in too early. Dry: it was loin, or overcooked. Watery tzatziki: the cucumber was not squeezed. Not charring: the pan is not hot enough, or the cubes are wet from the marinade — shake them off.
- Making it ahead
The marinade overnight and the tzatziki a day ahead; both improve.
- Keeping it
The cooked pork keeps two days. Tzatziki keeps three, though it weeps a little.
- Reheating
A hot dry pan for a minute. It toughens on a second cooking, so slightly undercook if you know there will be leftovers.
- Freezing
The raw marinated pork freezes for two months.
- Leftovers
Cold in a salad, or in a wrap with more tzatziki.
- Scaling it
Cook in batches so the griddle stays hot.
- Substitutions
Chicken thigh, lamb shoulder or halloumi all work with the same marinade and timings. Greek yogurt is essential to the tzatziki — ordinary natural yogurt is too thin unless it is strained.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten from the pitta and milk from the yogurt. The pork and marinade are naturally gluten free and dairy free. Nut free and egg free.
- Shopping for it
Ask a butcher for shoulder cut into cubes with the fat left on. Greek dried oregano, sold on the branch, is much stronger than supermarket oregano.
- Keeping the cost down
Pork shoulder is one of the cheapest cuts there is and is the correct one here, which is a rare alignment.
- Sustainability
Pork carries roughly a fifth of beef's footprint per kilogram, and shoulder is a working cut that is chronically less in demand than loin — cooking it takes pressure off the prime cuts of the same animal. Halloumi or large mushrooms take this marinade genuinely well, which is not true of every meat dish. The yogurt is the other dairy element and 300g feeds four.
- Nutrition
Good protein, and with salad in the pitta it is a reasonably balanced meal.
- Worth it?
Hold the lemon back for thirty minutes at the end. One change and the meat stops being chalky.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Greece.
- Also called
Souvlaki; the wrapped version is often a pita souvlaki, and gyros is the related dish carved from a vertical spit.
- Said out loud
soov-LAH-kee.
- What the name means
From souvla, a skewer or spit — a diminutive, so 'little skewer'.
- History
Grilling small pieces of meat on skewers is ancient in the Aegean: portable clay grill supports and charred skewers have been excavated at Akrotiri on Santorini and date to the Bronze Age, which makes this one of the oldest continuously recognisable cooking methods in Europe. The modern street food — meat in a pitta with tzatziki, tomato, onion and often chips — is a twentieth-century urban form.
- Why it matters
Greece's most eaten street food and, along with gyros, the thing most people outside Greece have eaten from a Greek kitchen.
- When it is eaten
Street food, barbecues, and a good weeknight dinner if the marinating is done the night before.
- The traditional way
Marinating in oil, garlic and oregano, then grilling hard over charcoal.
- How it changed
The pitta wrap is modern. The skewer itself has barely changed in three thousand years.
- Regional variations
Gyros is carved from a vertical rotisserie rather than skewered and is a different dish. In Cyprus, souvla is much larger pieces cooked slowly over charcoal.
- How this version differs
The lemon timing, which most recipes get wrong by putting it in at the start, and shoulder rather than loin.
- Sources and credit
None.
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Main courses
Dinner
Pork