Tired of paying for gyro meat with lots of suspect ingredients? Make your own homemade gyro meat with this super easy recipe! Savory, tender, easy gyro meat in a snap!

What is Authentic Gyro Meat?

Traditional gyro meat is ground lamb and beef seasoned with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern seasonings. It is stacked on a vertical spit and turned to cook, then sliced thinly directly onto sandwiches.

Mine is an Americanized version, born out of my desire to avoid the highly processed gyro meat you can buy in the refrigerator or freezer section of the grocery store.

Cooking it on a spit just doesn't work for me, but I wanted to capture flavor as authentic as I could and end with slices that are thin, well-seasoned, with crispy edges to get as close to authentic as I can realistically get.

Ingredients in Easy Gyro Meat Recipe

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{For full instructions and ingredient amounts, scroll down to the recipe card}

Traditional gyro meat uses ground lamb and ground beef. However, ground lamb is a bit hard to find in the rural area I live in, so I decided to use ground chicken and ground beef – and the let the seasoning and preparation method do the rest of the work for achieving the proper texture and taste.

The best Greek restaurants make their own gyro meat – and you can certainly taste the difference!

Ground Beef: Our beef comes from an entire cow that we purchase from a farmer each year. Therefore, I have no idea what % of fat it is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's on the fattier end of the scale.

Ground Chicken or Turkey: Using a leaner ground for the second type of ground meat balances out the fattier beef.

Garlic & Onion: Let's be honest – you'll find these in most dishes. They're delicious and there here for good reason.

Herbs: Rosemary, sage, coriander, smoked paprika, oregano, thyme, cumin, and sumac are all found in this seasoning – heavy recipe.

Salt & Pepper: a good quality sea salt and freshly cracked pepper are vital.

Scroll to the recipe card for ingredient amounts and directions.

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DID YOU MAKE THIS RECIPE?

If you try this recipe I would love to see it and share it! Tag me on IG @fitmomjourneythm, using the hashtag #fitmomjourney

Making Homemade Gyros

The best part is that this combination of flavors in a gyro just cannot be beat:

Fresh, warm pita bread piled high with gyro meat, tomato slices, thinly sliced red onion, feta, and cool creamy tzatziki sauce.

It is also great when served with other Greek food such as Mediterranean rice, and alongside a Greek salad.

Equipment Needed to Make Homemade Gyro Sandwiches

As always, having certain supplies on hand in the kitchen will make this recipe simpler, although many substitutions can be made for the exact items I used.

My kitchen essentials can always be found in my Amazon Storefront.

Since I'm guessing no one has a fancy equipment such as a giant vertical rotisserie sitting around to make this the traditional way – I certainly don't – we're going to go about this in a bit different way.

With that being said, there are a few things that will make this process easier:

Food Processor: for combining the ground meat and spices into a sort of paste. Makes for wonderful gyro texture in the finished product. If you don't have a food processor, I have actually used my blender to do this, but in small batches so as not to overheat it. A third option is to use a stand mixer to really mix it well. If worse comes to worse, just use your hands, do your best, and really focus on slicing it thin.

Loaf Pan: we're going to bake this gyro meat in a meatloaf pan, making it a uniform shape for the slicing step.

Mixing Bowl: If you don't have a good quality mixing bow, definitely pick one up. If you cook from home a lot, you'll use it nearly every day.

Optional Step – Meat Slicer: If you choose the more authentic method for making gyro meat, you'll first freeze the raw loaf of meat for about 2 hours, enough that it firms up quite a bit. Then, you'll make very thing gyro meat slices with the meat slicer and cook those in a skillet from raw.

Chef's Knife: for slicing the cooked gyro meat. If you're forgoing the meat slicer method above, cook the loaf of gyro meat, then after cooling slice it into thin slices with a sharp chef's knife.

xoxo,
Gretchen

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