Authentic Greek Tzatziki Sauce (Yogurt & Cucumber Dip)

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Cooking With Anadi

12K subscribers · creamy yogurt and cucumber, bright with lemon and dill

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If you’ve been following me for awhile now, you know that I love to pair pretty much all of my meals with a dipping sauce! Dips can certainly make a meal significantly more exciting. For many meals, I have two or even three sauces at a time so that I’ve got variety - it truly is the spice of life, after all!

One of my favorite cuisines since pretty much when I began my cooking journey has been Greek. I recently replicated my favorite Greek meals after quite some time - chicken souvlaki skewers with tzatziki sauce, lemon and herb rice, and baked lemon potatoes. Every time I make this or even eat it at Jimmy the Greek, it totally hits the spot! Have you always wanted to create your own Greek feast? While tzatziki sauce just seems like a small element, it really is the glue to hold your meal together! You can get started by building your Greek feast by following this tzatziki sauce recipe as part of your Live to Cook one-month challenge! If you want to get started on your cooking journey for free, then be sure to sign up to my email newsletter for all of my inspirational resources, plus you’ll get all of my new recipes delivered straight to your inbox!

To see the exact process and how quick it is to make your very own tzatziki sauce, then be sure to watch the video! I’d really appreciate it if you would please subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven’t already and don’t forget to press the bell button to be notified when all of my video recipes are live! Let’s get mixing!

Tools Needed to Make Tzatziki Sauce

• Garlic press
• Mixing bowl
• Whisk
• Cutting board
• Grater

Ingredients for Greek Tzatziki Sauce

There are only a few staple ingredients we’ll need for this Authentic Greek Tzatziki Sauce. For full ingredient quantities and instructions, scroll to the bottom of this post for the FULL PRINTABLE recipe card. The recipe card will also allow you to scale the recipe based on how much Tzatziki you want to make - whether for a single meal or for a big crowd for dipping, all individual components will automatically be adjusted!

• Greek yogurt: Go for full fat Greek yogurt for best results. It’ll taste better and it’ll be super creamy! You can’t substitute with regular yogurt because it is too runny. If all you have is regular yogurt, strain it into hung curd first so your tzatziki stays thick.
• Olive oil: Extra virgin olive oil is best! Olive oil is a staple in Greek cooking, and while it not only adds lots of flavor to your sauce, but it will also add a wonderful shine.
• English cucumber: I really like to use the English cucumbers because they’re sweeter and the thin skin doesn’t require you to peel the cucumbers prior. I just grate them right away!
• Garlic: A few cloves of minced garlic.
• Lemon: A little bit of lemon juice to refresh the dip.
• Fresh dill: Other herbs you can use are parsley or mint.
• salt and pepper: Add these to taste!

How to Make Greek Tzatziki Sauce

Add yogurt to a large bowl and finely grate the cucumber and squeeze any excess water from the cucumber.

Add the shredded cucumber to the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Season to taste.

Mix well until combined. Chill for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

The Tip You Need to Know for Perfect Tzatziki Sauce

Excess moisture will cause the tzatziki sauce to separate. You want to extract as much moisture as possible from the cucumber so that the flavors in the sauce are not diluted. As a result, be sure to really squeeze out the grated cucumber so you’re left with as little moisture as possible so you don’t have a soggy mess with the finished product.

Bonus tip: Really make sure you allow the tzatziki sauce to chill in the fridge before serving to allow the flavors to sink into the yogurt and really work their magic!

How to Serve Authentic Tzatziki Sauce

• Gyros: These are Greek wraps that are made with chicken, pork, beef or lamb. The meat is cooked on a vertical rotisserie, and then wrapped in Greek pita. Other add-ins for the wrap include sliced tomatoes, onions, and lettuce. Of course, tzatziki is the go-to sauce choice!
• Shawarmas: Lebanese meat sandwiches made with either chicken or beef, also prepared on a vertical rotisserie. You can try out my Chicken Shawarma recipe! While a garlic sauce is typically added (check out my toum recipe!), tzatziki would also be delicious! If you need a shawarma in a hurry, then try out my Quick Healthy Chicken Shawarma Wrap.
• Other sandwiches and wraps: There are no rules in the kitchen when it comes to how to use an ingredient! As I mention in my Make Cooking Fun!! free motivational guide to explore your potential in the kitchen, when you’ve got an ingredient that is perishable, you should use that up! Get creative with your tzatziki and explore different sandwich combinations with a variety of toppings, proteins, and breads. Check out my guide to prep the perfect sandwiches. One example where tzatziki would be incredible is in my Vegan Black Bean Pita Pockets (however note that these pockets will no longer be vegan with tzatziki).
• Vegetables: Dip carrots, celery, broccoli, cherry tomatoes and any other veggies that you like for a healthy mid-day snack!
• Fries: While plain Oven-Baked Fries would be incredible dipped in tzatziki, for a true Greek restaurant experience, try serving your Air Fryer Feta Fries or Garlic Parmesan Fries with some tzatziki!
• Meat: You can enjoy pieces of your succulent Souvlaki Chicken Skewers dipped in tzatziki or spread the sauce over your meat! It would also be incredible served with Greek-style meatballs, or my Sheet Pan Shawarma Dinner.
• Pizza: You could dip your slices in tzatziki or drizzle it over the pizza!
• Pita chips: Either pan fry or bake pita bread cut into triangles, and dip or drizzle the tzatziki on top! Any other chip or cracker is perfect for dipping too.

How to Store Tzatziki — and Why It Goes Watery

Tzatziki keeps in an airtight container in the fridge for about 3 to 4 days. It is genuinely better on day two than on day one, because the garlic and dill need time to move through the yogurt — which is the same reason the recipe asks you to chill it for at least 15 minutes before it ever reaches the table. What it does not do well is sit around at room temperature, so bring out only what you plan to serve and keep the rest cold.

The thing you will notice is a pool of liquid on the surface after a day or two. That is not the sauce going off; it is the last of the water leaving the cucumber, plus a little whey separating out of the yogurt. Pour the liquid off and stir the sauce back together and it is fine. If it happens badly, the cucumber was not squeezed hard enough — as covered above, excess moisture is the one thing that ruins this sauce, and half an English cucumber holds far more water than you would think.

If you want to be thorough about it, salt the grated cucumber lightly and let it sit in a sieve for 10 minutes before you squeeze. The salt pulls the water out osmotically and you will get noticeably more liquid out than by squeezing alone. Wring it in a clean kitchen towel or a piece of cheesecloth rather than just your hands. Just remember you have already added salt at that point, so season the finished sauce carefully at the end.

Freezing is not worth it. Yogurt splits when it thaws and the cucumber turns limp, so you would be left with something you need to drain and re-whisk into a shadow of what it was. Since this takes 10 minutes and no cooking at all, make it fresh. And note the recipe card yields 12 servings from half a cup of yogurt — if you are feeding a crowd or putting out a mezze spread, scale it in the recipe card rather than guessing, because the garlic in particular does not scale linearly for most people's taste.

Tzatziki vs. Raita and Other Yogurt-Cucumber Sauces

Almost every cuisine with a yogurt tradition has a version of this, and knowing the differences helps you pick the right one for the meal. Tzatziki is Greek and is built on thick, strained Greek yogurt with olive oil, lemon, garlic and dill, which is what makes it firm enough to sit on a plate rather than run off it.

My cucumber raita is the Indian counterpart, and the differences are real ones: it uses plain thin yogurt rather than Greek, it is loose and pourable by design because it is meant to be spooned over rice or eaten alongside something spicy, and it is seasoned with roasted cumin rather than garlic and dill. There is no olive oil in it at all. Use raita to cool down heat; use tzatziki as a dip or a spread.

The other two you will run into are Turkish cacık, which is essentially tzatziki thinned with water into something closer to a cold soup and often finished with mint, and Persian mast-o-khiar, which adds dried mint, walnuts and sometimes raisins. If you have made this recipe and want to move sideways, swapping the quarter cup of fresh dill for mint takes you most of the way toward cacık, and the post's ingredient notes already flag mint and parsley as legitimate herb swaps here.

What Yogurt to Use for Tzatziki

The recipe card asks for half a cup of Greek yogurt, and full fat is the one thing here worth being stubborn about. Low-fat Greek yogurt makes a thinner, sharper sauce that struggles to hold a spoon, and since there are only a handful of simple ingredients in the bowl, the yogurt is carrying most of the texture.

Worth knowing what you are approximating: in Greece, tzatziki is traditionally made with sheep or goat's milk yogurt, which is tangier and faintly grassy in a way cow's milk is not. What sits on shelves here is almost always cow's milk, and that is what this recipe is written for. If you have a Greek or Middle Eastern grocer nearby, a tub of sheep's milk yogurt is worth trying once so you know what the original tastes like.

Regular plain yogurt works as well, with one condition. The ingredient notes list plain whole-milk yogurt as a substitution, but strain it first through a fine sieve or a cheesecloth-lined colander, or the sauce will be too loose to dip anything in. Sour cream is the other listed swap, at the same ratio, and comes out slightly tangier. Scaling is straightforward: the ratio is half a cup of yogurt to half an English cucumber, so 2 cups Greek yogurt to two cucumbers if you are building a mezze platter.

On the grating and the seasoning: use the fine side of a box grater for the cucumber rather than a food processor, which turns it to slush and releases water you then have to fight. Salt and pepper both go in to taste at the end. Kosher salt is easier to judge by hand in a cold sauce you can keep tasting, and black pepper is the default, though a few grinds is plenty in something this pale.

What to Serve With Tzatziki

Tzatziki belongs on a table with other things rather than on its own. Put it out with warm pita and a plate of fresh veggies for dipping, cucumber spears, carrot sticks and strips of bell pepper, and it disappears faster than anything else on the board. It is also the dish that quietly makes a Greek salad into a meal, spooned alongside rather than tossed through.

Beyond a dip, it works as a spread inside a wrap or a pita sandwich, as a cooling sauce next to anything grilled and charred, and as a dressing thinned with a splash of water and poured over a chopped salad. Finish the bowl the way the recipe suggests, with a drizzle of extra olive oil on top, and add a few leaves of fresh mint alongside the dill if you want it brighter.

Other Easy Sauce & Dip Recipes!

• Classic Spicy Aioli
• Chunky Mango Guacamole
• Garlic Truffle Aioli
• Thai Curry Mayonnaise
• Sweet & Spicy Tomato Chutney
• Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney
• Cilantro-Mint Chutney
• Traditional Indian Cucumber Raita
• Authentic Pico de Gallo
• Classic Guacamole