[Sca-cooks] Gyro? Hero?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Michael Gunter wrote:
>
> I just got an email from my compatriot
> in the kitchen, Baroness Alys, who
> had a random thought. She realized that
> a gyro is pronounced "Yee-roh". She
> also knows that a submarine sandwich
> is referred to as a "hero" in that
> area.
>
> She feels, and with a good argument,
> that it may be named be that a long
> sandwich with meats as a "Yee-roh"
> and then Americanized to "Hero".
>
> Or it could simply be coincidence and
> the sandwich was so named because it
> was of "heroic" proportions.

Okay, here's the scoop as I understand it.

In various parts of the MidEast, meat is seasoned highly, skewered and
grilled as a stack of flat pieces, say, boned thighs and drumsticks of
chicken, with the skin included to help keep it all moist. Alternately,
pieces of boned lamb or veal breast, which is pretty highly marbled, can
be used. You lay the stack on the grill on its side, and when enough of
it is cooked through and crunchy, you flip it over and carve a few
slices (which get served with breads, salads, and such), until you get
down to medium rare or rare, then flip it over and repeat the process.
This dish is known in places like Lebanon, Turkey, and Israel as
shwarma. The grilled slices you remove are actually composite slices
welded together with fat or fatty poultry skin in between, so the meat
has a distinctively stripey, marbled bacony look.

Shwarma is also enjoyed by Greeks, and it has been eaten in the U.S. for
quite a while, but for some reason the dish became known by the name of
the commercial rotisserie generally used in restaurants to cook this
dish. The name, in Greek, for the type of vertical-spit rotisserie that
spins around and allows you to lice off bits of meat without taking the
meat from the spit, is Gyro. Depending on where you are in Greece (or
elsewhere), what your accent is like, and whether you spend a lot of
time talking to Americans, it is pronounced variously as JY-ro, JEE-ro,
GEE-ro, or YEE-ro. (Which latter is really more like ghyro, with a very
soft "g", than like yeero.)

Ideally, gyro is made from stacked slices, usually, of lamb, veal, or
pork, with alternating slices of fat. At some point somebody came up
with the idea of using ground meat, and this is tasty enough, if a bit
unorthodox. Then there is the truly heretical, which is a little
flaked-and-formed strip of meat about six inches long and maybe 2 inches
wide, which you take out of the freezer and place on a hamburger griddle
or some such. This is occasionally sold under the gyro name, too, in
spite of never having been spun.

HTH

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com