Kofta and tzatziki

Lamb kofta and tzatziki
Lamb kofta and tzatziki

Summery and full of flavour ?

Ingredients

For the kofta / meatballs

  • 1kg meat (their recipe called for chicken mince but it’s hard to find so I used lamb)
  • 150g feta cheese
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tbsp breadcrumbs
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • Ground black pepper
  • White part of 5-6 spring onions, finely chopped (Keep the green part for the tzatziki) ~ 50g
  • 40 g of dill, chopped (30g for kofta, 10g for tzatziki)
  • 10 g chopped fresh oregano leaves or 1 tbsp dry leaves
  • Zest of 1 lime

For the tzatziki

  • 250 g yoghurt
  • The ~30 g of green part of spring onions, finely chopped
  • The 10g of chopped dill
  • 1 clove of garlic, peeled and minced
  • zest and juice of one lime
  • 200g cucumbers, roughly grated and squeezed in a colander to remove liquid
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • Optional: extra cucumber shaved into ribbons

Preparation

  1. Kofta mix, ready to bake
    Neatly arranged… ready to bake…

    Chop the kofta ingredients and mix everything well in a bowl. I used my clean hands to do this and ensure there weren’t “pockets” of unmixed bits. You can then shape them into balls ready to fry or bake. Since I chose to bake, I placed them directly on an oven tray. If you were to fry them, it’s a good idea to let the mix to rest for 1 to 24 hours in the fridge, so as to ‘bind’ better together and avoid them breaking down when being fried.

  2. Set the oven to 220ºC, then bake the kofta until they’re golden. Since I was using lamb with a high content of fat, they ended up almost floating in their own fat ?

    Cooked lamb kofta
    Cooked lamb kofta
  3. Prepare the tzatziki by chopping and grating its ingredients as noted in the list. If you’re done before the kofta are cooked, I suggest you keep it in the fridge, covered.

    Tzatziki
    Delicious tzatziki
  4. You can make the decorative cucumber slices using a peeler. I have a hunch that it’ll work better with small cucumbers than with the bigger one I used, where the ratio peel to diameter is way smaller, so there was a lot of ‘white’ bits and it was a bit hard to make the peels pretty.
  5. You can also slice the grated lime and place on the dishes for decoration and also maybe to squeeze over the kofta.
Lamb kofta and tzatziki
Lamb kofta and tzatziki

To serve, place a bunch of kofta on a dish, with some of the tzatziki, the cucumber shaves, the limes and any other beautiful yummy salady things you could think of! I forgot about the wrap but I reckon a bit of warm bread would be delicious to clean the plate from any tzatziki leftovers.

This was really good and I’m sure I’ll make more of this in the future. I really liked the tzatziki, and now each time I walk past tzatziki pots in the supermarket aisles I feel super smug about mine ?

Also!

If you have any leftovers, they keep SUPER well in the fridge, tightly sealed containers.

The kofta are an excellent snack and you can eat them as they are or re-heat them.

The tzatziki might separate a bit after a while, so stir it before serving.

Finally, a trick: if you’re making this for someone who’s gluten intolerant or you simply don’t have breadcrumbs handy, you could use almond flour or similar to replace them in the kofta mix. I’ve done this in the past and it’s a good ingredient to absorb the moisture and help the mix to bind. Obviously, check the person is not allergic to nuts, etc. Maybe you could use chickpea flour!

Credits

This is again a recipe inspired by my ever-lasting source of food inspiration: Honey & Co (again!). They published a recipe for chicken kofta in the FT magazine, but since we recycle it after reading, and I also deviated a bit from their recipe, I wanted to make a note here for posterity (and future recreations of the recipe as it turned out fantastic!).

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