Category: Food

Sometimes lamb, sometimes pork

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

Alex Lambroulis would like to clear up a couple of misconceptions about gyros.

Greek people pronounce gyros “YEE-rose” but most Americans pronounce it “JYE-rose.” Either way, it refers to spit-roasted meat served on pita bread with shredded lettuce, tomato, thin-sliced onion and cucumber, topped with a garlicky yogurt sauce called tzatziki.

Lambroulis is one of the owners of Karv Greek Kouzina in Windham.

“Traditionally, a common misconception,” he said, “is that a gyro is always made with lamb and beef. But growing up in Greece, every street corner has a gyro place and they’re all actually pork. We pretty much save lamb and beef or lamb in general for special occasions on the rotisserie and things like that. But that being said, we do offer it here [at Karv]. The lamb and beef is a good combination of how lamb can sometimes be an acquired taste for Americans and can be a little bit more on the gamey side if there’s too much of it. And also truthfully, obviously, the price point of it is important, too. Lamb is way, way, way more expensive, so in order to make it affordable for customers, [we use] layers of lamb and beef together.”

Another lamb-y misconception is how big a part it plays in a Greek diet.

“I think it’s just important to know that we don’t truly eat lamb all the time in Greece,” Lambroulis said. “It’s more reserved for special occasions. And also, the farmers like to save sheep for the milk that they produce.” Feta cheese is usually made from sheep’s milk, for example.

Another misconception Lambroulis would like to clear up is that gyros are not the same as shawarma, which also comes from the Mediterranean and is made with spit-roasted meat.

“The pita bread first off is different,” he explained. “Shawarma is more like a pocket pita and then they kind of roll it in it. Whereas gyro is a pocketless pita, it’s a little fluffier and it’s a little bit more round. And then the sauce, you know, the tzatziki versus whatever shawarma, which would be more tahini-ish. So there’s that and the flavor of the spices and the meat itself, you know, how we marinate it.”

Karv’s name comes from a play on words, Lambroulis said.

“The word ‘karvouno’ means charred or broiled or charcoal-cooked,” he explained. “We cook the meat on a rotisserie and it’s broiled. So that’s kind of like half of that word. Plus obviously, we actually carve the meat off the rotisserie.”

Lambroulis was one of the original owners of the Gyro Spot in Manchester.

“I originally opened the Gyro Spot on Elm Street back in 2012 with my mom,” he remembered. “And that was very successful for us. About three and a half years ago I sold it just because I needed a break; my wife and I had our first son and I wanted to be present for him, and him not growing up in the back of a restaurant. Now that he’s started day care I’ve partnered up with a business partner and we decided to do a similar concept as before but something a little bit more. [Karv] still has counter service, but we have runners bringing the food out, and it’s a little bit more of an expanded menu.” In addition to six types of gyros, the new menu includes Greek favorites like falafel, spanakopita (a spinach and feta dish made with phyllo dough), and a variety of main courses, bowls and sides.

“We have smoothies,” Lambroulis added. “We have a whole Greek bakery section, with pastries that are imported from Greece. Our pita bread is imported and it literally only has four ingredients, so that makes it a little bit more on the health-conscious side. Don’t get me wrong, we have french fries and we have fried dough balls and super fun stuff.”So it’s just, I don’t know, it’s fun being creative and coming up with these wacky kinds of twisted flavors.”

Karv Greek Kouzina

Where: 1 Delahunty Drive, Windham, 377-5278, karvgreek.com
Hours: open seven days a week, 11 a.m to 9 p.m. Eat in, or order takeout online over the phone or in person.

Featured photo: Three gyros. Photo courtesy of Karv Greek Kouzina.

A bartender explains how bitters & tinctures add flavor

When a bartender is developing a new cocktail, a constant challenge is being able to add subtle or sophisticated flavors to the drink in a way that doesn’t throw off the ratios of other ingredients. Maybe she’s spent a week calculating the exact balance of alcohol and mixers, for instance, and introducing a new element might throw that off or make the drink cloudy. Maybe the flavor of the new ingredient is inconsistent from week to week, and it’s hard to reliably get the right flavor in the finished product.

One of Marissa Chick’s favorite ways to address these issues is to use highly concentrated flavors in the form of bitters and tinctures in her cocktails.

Chick is the bar manager at The Birch on Elm in Manchester, and she uses commercial bitters but also makes a lot of her own.

“They’re really fun to work with,” she said. “What I end up making at the Birch on Elm is more of like a tincture but essentially it’s a really concentrated burst of flavors. So you can have your simple cocktails — like for example a dirty martini — something that I like to add to that is a black pepper tincture that I make. It adds just a little bit of something and you usually only need a few drops, but it’ll just bring out a burst of flavor that you didn’t already have or you might have been missing.”

Chick uses alcohol to strip flavors from ingredients she wants to incorporate into a new drink recipe.

“The way that I make them, honestly, is usually with a super high-proof alcohol,” she explained. “I usually use Everclear [an extremely potent brand of grain alcohol that can run as high as 95% Alcohol By Volume, or 190 proof] and then I will just add my ingredients to it and let it sit in the dark for anywhere from five days to a few weeks, depending on how strong I want it to be.”

These tinctures often use fresh herbs or whole spices but can also use more unusual flavoring agents. Chick recently won a daiquiri-making competition that used a house-made bubblegum tincture. She said coming up with a recipe she was happy with involved a process of gradually increasing the amount of bubblegum she used.

“I grabbed Dubble Bubble, because that’s the one I like the best,” she said. “I tried a couple different ways, but I ended up needing way more bubble gum than I thought I would. In the end, it was practically an entire jar of bubble gum and just filled to the top with Everclear, but I ended up having to redo it a few times because it turns out that surprisingly it didn’t produce as strong a scent as I thought it would. You learn a lot through experimentation and trying again and having fun with it, which is exactly how that one came about. In the cocktail itself, I used a lot of ingredients that bubblegum is made with, like mint, pineapple, cranberry and cherry. Then I added that tincture to it to add a pure bubblegum flavor on it so that it tasted a lot like bubblegum, without making it too sweet.”

Chick said that as she was working up the bubblegum tincture, she decided not to cut the actual bubblegum into smaller pieces. “I just put them in whole,” she said, “and then I shook it up multiple times a day. I took a lot more care with it than other ones, I suppose.”

One of her favorite concentrates is one she makes from Fresno chilies. “It just tastes like the real pepper,” she said, “and you get such a good heat from it. It takes on the same orange-red color as the pepper. I’ve used other [chilies] like jalapeño, and it’s slightly green. Habañero is a brighter, almost neon-orange color. So that is a fun part of it too. Sometimes tinctures can add color sometimes as well instead of just flavor.”

And it doesn’t take much of a tincture to have an effect.

“It’s a lot of flavor,” Chick said. “Just a couple drops does a lot. If it’s something that you really want a lot of, you could use a whole pipette, but that’s the biggest measurement I would use for that.”

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.