Jeremy Leinen, CEC, Executive Chef, The Country Club of Rochester
This is a flavor combo I’ve been meaning to put together for a while. The idea came to me from the memory of a few trips to Flip Burger by Richard Blais. He came up with a cool way of building burger concepts around flavors that aren’t typically eaten between two halves of a bun. There was a lamb burger with feta, a chorizo burger with a fried egg, and other clever iterations.
I’m known as ‘the sausage guy,’ so naturally, I’ve wanted to play around with different flavor pairings and make an interesting sausage out of them.
The idea of a gyro just came to me, and it ties back to one of my favorite childhood food memories. I grew up in rural West Virginia and was exposed to gryos from a middle eastern grocery store when I was about nine. Compared to the food I typically saw in this area, gyros seemed so exotic—I loved them instantly.
For this dish, I wanted to meld the idea of a sausage with toppings with the flavors of a typical gyro, particularly the Americanized version usually made from strips of pressed meat. Authenticity is tricky here, as this version we see in America is nothing like what is served in Greece. For one, they’re piling thin marinated cuts of meat on a vertical spit and roasting it—it’s absolutely not coming as strips of meat in a box. Also, lamb isn’t typical of gyros in Greece; they’re more commonly pork or chicken. There’s a big difference between that and the lamb-and-veal-based pressed meat strips some of us grew up on.
To keep this as simple as possible, I opted for a mix of lamb and pork. The pork might upset people, and they might cry fowl and say it’s not authentic, but we have to put authenticity in context here—and also keep in mind that I’m half German, and sausage is all about pork.
This was my first attempt, and I was trying to mirror the flavor of Americanized gyro meat as much as possible. When I tasted it, I knew I had nailed it; it tasted exactly how I remembered.
We’re serving this as a sausage, so put it on a bun of your choosing and top it with the usual suspects: tzatziki sauce or tahini sauce, fresh cucumbers, onions, tomatoes and maybe some feta cheese if you’d like.
