Tzatziki Sauce: A Refreshing and Low-Calorie Dip That Can Be Served Cold!

Hey busy moms!

We hope you're having a great start to your week!

For today’s Meal Monday blog we’d like to share with you a light, healthy, creamy, and versatile sauce that can be used over various meals. The tzatziki sauce is a popular Greek sauce that’s garlicky in flavor and is usually eaten with Mediterranean meals like pita bread, gyros, grilled chicken, lamb meat, and lots of vegetables like broccoli, carrots, and cucumber sticks.

This is a quick and fun sauce to make with your kids! All we have to do today is wash, dry, chop up the ingredients, and delegate the mixing to our kids for a fun bonding activity. This dip is usually (and is best served) cold so there’s no need for cooking.

This sauce can be used to “hide” vegetables in your kids’ meals. There’s no need to worry about using too much of it over veggies because the dip itself is actually really healthy.

A battle between the 2 most popular Mediterranean dips…

When we think of Mediterranean sauces, we’re sure that hummus and tzatziki dips come to mind. We’re here to help you differentiate between the two.

Hummus is a popular sauce made with mashed or blended chickpeas, tahini (grounded sesame seeds), olive oil, lemon juice, and various spices like paprika. It is a healthy dip that’s full of fiber and protein, but has more calories compared to Tzatziki sauce. We recomment using it over grilled vegetables and meat, and it is also a great sauce for those who are lactose intolerant.

Tzatziki sauce on the other hand is a tangy, refreshing sauce that uses yogurt as its base alongside herbs and vegetables. This is usually served cold over veggies and meat cuts. This is a low-calorie dip (only 54 calories per serving) and is much easier to make because there’s no need to use a blender or a food processor.

Now that we covered the basic differences, let’s get started!

You’ll need:

A whole tub of plain or Greek yogurt

Cloves of garlic (7-8 cloves)

Dill

Cucumbers (2 whole cucumbers)

Lemon juice (2 lemons)

Olive oil (2 tbsps)

Salt (½ tsp)

Let’s start by washing and drying out all the ingredients with a paper towel.

Put a tub of plain or Greek (we used Greek) yogurt in a huge bowl where you can easily stir everything in without making a huge mess in the kitchen.

Mince about 7-8 cloves of garlic and put it over the yogurt.

Now, the herbs. Take all the dill you have (be really generous with it) and chop it into small pieces. Try to run over your knife only once so the flavor doesn’t get transferred onto the chopping board. Once you’re finished, put the chopped dill in the bowl as well.

Now, this is where you can ask your kids for help! Ask them to mix everything together while you work on the next few steps.

Take out your cucumbers and peel them. Dry them out, and slice them lengthwise to expose the middle part. Scrape out the seeds using a spoon because this is watery and will make the sauce thinner than we want it to be. Then, slice the cucumbers into small cubes. Put the cucumber slices in the bowl and stir them into the sauce.

Add olive oil, freshly-squeezed lemon juice, and salt to the sauce. Let your kids keep on mixing it until it all blends together well.

For the last step, just let the sauce sit for at least an hour before consumption to make sure that all the flavors blend into each other.

And there you have it! Now you have a delicious sauce that you and your kids can never overuse because of how healthy it is! Share with us how you’ll use it and what meals you’ll eat it with. Just click here to watch the full Meal Monday video and leave your thoughts in the comments section. We hope you enjoyed this and have a great week!

- Micah from Mom Training