macrakis@harvard.ARPA (Stavros Macrakis) (11/15/85)
> ... souvlaki is made from lamb and the gyro is beef...
OK. Once again, with feeling.
Souvlaki (Gk= skewerlet); Shish Kebab (Turk= sword meat); Shashlik (Turk?)
A dish of cubes of marinated meat (usually lamb, but can be beef or
chicken), sometimes interspersed with pieces of vegetable, grilled on
a skewer. Some Greek restaurants call the one with vegetables
Souvlaki and the one without Shish kebab, or vice versa.
Gyro (Gk= (turn) around); Doner Kebab (Turk= turning meat; also used
in Greek); Shwarma (Arab= ?)
Spiced sliced or (less good) ground meat placed on a vertical skewer
in a large mound, thinner at the bottom than at the top, grilled in
front of coals or a gas or electric burner and sliced off as needed.
`Donair' is presumably a spelling of `doner'.
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Both are often served in flat bread (Pita (Gk), Pide (Turk), Syrian
Bread, Khoubz Sham (Arab= Levantine bread)). In this country, the
bread is usually split open and the filling put inside. In the
Levant, the usual way is to roll the bread around the filling, and wax
paper around the bread (which has been lightly fried).
The filling is usually composed of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and
onions. A sauce can be added which is either yoghurt-based (tzatziki
(Gk), jajik (Turk), salatit-zabedi (Arab= yoghurt salad)) or ground-
sesame-seed based (tahini/a, salatit-tahina). In milk-producing
areas, you are likely to have yoghurt, in dryer areas, tahini. The
sauces contain garlic and lemon, and cucumber if yoghurt-based. In
Turkey, there are other variants, such as tomato sauce.
Kebab (Turk), by the way, does not mean `shish kebab'. Kebab appears
to mean--it is hard to pin down--a dish composed largely of meat. For
instance, there is `spoon' kebab, which is a stew.
The usual run of Syrian bread is not ideal for these sandwiches: there
is a bread that I buy frozen at an Indian store (they call it some
kind of naan, I think) here made by a Greek company in New York....
The nice thing about doner for the restaurant is that it is ideally
suited for feeding large numbers of people. When business picks up,
you move the meat closer to the heat; when it's slow, further. The
Levantine McDonalds.
-s