I am so ready for summer, are you with me? In summer I start a food transition where I go from hot dishes to cold ones, like this tzatziki chickpea salad with cucumbers.
This salad has many things going for it. It is fast and easy, cool and creamy, and loaded with flavor. Tzatziki has become popular for a reason, it’s a flavor is bold and delicious!
For this salad we use cucumber in two ways: diced and shredded. Diced cucumber goes into the salad with the chickpeas while shredded is drained and added to the tzatziki sauce. I drain my cucumber by placing it in a small mesh colander and press gently.
Making the best tzatziki sauce is crucial to making this simple salad flavorful. I have a love relationship with using red wine vinaigrette in my tzatziki. It does give it some slight coloration to the sauce but the flavor is bold, which is exactly what you expect from a quality tzatziki sauce.
Variations to the Tzatziki Chickpea Salad with Cucumber:
- Use salted chickpeas in this recipe. Chickpeas make up the bulk of the ingredients, so if they are lacking flavor, the salad will be too. Sometimes I opt for unsalted beans, but not for this salad.
- Try fresh dill: Replace the dried dill with about 2 tsp fresh minced if it is available.
- Additional Mix-ins: If you are looking to amp this salad up even more you could mix in feta cheese, halved cherry tomatoes, or more fresh herbs like parsley or mint.
- Simple swaps: Use fresh lemon juice of for the red wine vinegar, try green onion in place of the red or yellow onion.
- What kind of Greek yogurt? I prefer 2%, but anything will work here. If you like to use whole milk yogurt or non-fat, go for it! I cannot recommend regular yogurt because it is thinner and the sauce won’t cling to the chickpeas as well.
- 15 oz can chickpea, drained
- ½ cup hothouse cucumber, diced
- 2 TBS diced red or yellow onion
- ½ cup Greek yogurt
- ¼ cup shredded cucumber, drained
- 2 tsp red wine vinegar
- 1-2 garlic cloves, minced
- ½ tsp each: kosher salt and dried dill
- ¼ tsp black pepper
- Toss the chickpeas, diced cucumber and onion in a medium bowl.
- To make the tzatziki stir together the Greek yogurt, shredded cucumber, red wine vinegar, minced garlic, salt, dill and pepper in another bowl.
- Mix the tzatziki into the chickpea mixture, stirring to coat. Serve.
This recipe is adapted from my Tempeh Gyros with Tzatziki recipe.
