Goat Gyros with Fresh Pita, Caprese Chicken Burgers & Eggplant Fries, Summery Radiatore, Ferments, Fig Carrot Bread & More!

To save time, I told myself I’d alternate What’s Cooking and Farm Update blogs every other week. But sometimes I cook so much, there’d be too much to fit two weeks worth of meals, baked goods and ferments!

This is one of those weeks, celebrating summer produce like tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant with delicious goat gyros with fresh pita, Caprese chicken burgers with eggplant fries, veggie loaded pasta, lots of fermented veggies and a fun fig carrot bread.

Bellegarde Pizza Dough for Pita!

Did you know you can use Bellegarde’s pizza dough as pita bread?

I have made pita bread before and recently started making large batches of my own pizza dough for our major pizza habit, but I wanted to test this to recommend to customers for an easy option for homemade pita.

All I did was defrost the dough (in the fridge for about a day) and cut them into four pieces. They end up as triangles so then I stretched and folded each triangle a few times to re-shape them into circles.

I let them proof at room temperature for an hour or so well I prepped other things and then rolled them out with a rolling pin and cooked on the stove with a cast iron skillet. I usually put a lid on between flips to have the steam help cook it. They puffed perfectly and were super tasty!

Goat Gyros with Tzatziki, Tomato Salad & Whole Roasted Okra

The point of the fresh pita was for homemade gyros! I am working on writing a real, bonafide recipe for this as it’s truly one of the best things to make with our ground goat meat.

The concept is making a denser meatloaf by pulsing the raw meat in the food processor with onions and oregano and salt (and other seasonings if you like) to then be able to slice thin pieces off and sear them. It’s the closest you can get to a gyro on a spit at home, in my opinion!

Since our forage-finished goat meat is lean, you need some additional fat to help bind it together. There’s a Serious Eats recipe I have used as reference many times over the years that calls for bacon as the fat, but that seems like a waste of bacon to me when ground goat meat works perfectly well, too.

Pork and goat together can seem like sacrilege under some cultures, but this is a Greek inspired recipe, so I guess it isn’t in that case! Fattier ground beef or even all ground goat and some beef fat from the trim/fat packs we sell would also work. But we’re getting limited on our beef and have plenty of pork, so I went that route.

To go with the gyro strips and fresh pita, I made a tzatziki with yogurt, mayo, cucumbers, olive oil, garlic and dill, along with a tomato and red onion salad and whole roasted okra finished with nutritional yeast. It was a really delicious combination.

We had some fresh lettuce from Homegrown in Folsom, so the leftovers I piled into wraps with lettuce, tomatoes, hummus and tzatziki and those were incredible, too!

Baked Eggplant Fries & Heirloom Tomato Sauce

This is one of my absolute favorite things to do with large Italian eggplants, but it is so tedious! Worth it, but tedious.

I had some beautiful heirloom tomatoes, each with a few spots or cracks in them, so I started by cooking those down with yellow onions and butter into a sauce (ala the famous Marcella Hazan recipe) to dip the eggplant in. Everyone thinks Italians and olive oil, not butter, but there’s is something about the butter that brings out the brightness in tomatoes like nothing else!

For the eggplant, I cut two large black beauty eggplant into sticks and then set up my batter station with salted flour, eggs and then a mix of homemade breadcrumbs, a little corn meal, parmesan and seasonings. The order is flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs. It can get messy and let me say for the third time that it is tedious, but if you get your zen on with some good music or a podcast, you can get into it!

After that, the hard part is done and you space out on a parchment lined baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil and bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes or so, flipping halfway.

Somehow even with out much oil, they get crispy on the outside and perfectly velvety on the inside. A dream!

Caprese Chicken Burgers

The main event to go with these eggplant fries was Caprese chicken burgers.

I seasoned ground chicken with Credo Farm’s mineral seasoning, which has kelp, sea salt and bunch of herbs, plus ALL CAPS Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning, minced fresh basil, fresh parmesan, breadcrumbs and an egg.

Then I seared them in a cast iron pan and topped with fresh mozzarella cheese, salted heirloom tomatoes, truffle mayo, basil vinaigrette and fresh basil on a Bellegarde brioche bun.

We also had leftover tzatziki sauce that we used as salad dressing with lettuce, arugula and crispy chickpeas, plus the delicious eggplant fries, pureed heirloom tomato sauce and extra slices of tomatoes.

Roasted Eggplant & Tomato Radiatore, Pizza & Greek Salad

For the eggplant fries, I had some I sliced but didn’t have room for on the pan and ran out of steam to bread more!

Plus I had even more to cut up, so I did a big batch of cubed roasted eggplant destined for pasta!

I tossed with olive oil and seasoned with sea salt, Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning and drizzled with olive oil, then roasted for 25 minutes or so at 400 degrees before adding some more tomatoes that needed to be used up.

The eggplant fries were gone, but I did have some of the pureed tomato sauce left, so I used that as the base of the sauce, then added in cooked radiatore pasta and all the roasted eggplant and tomatoes and mixed it all together. Radiatore is perfect for catching lots of silky sauce in its ridges and folds.

I added in a bunch of fresh basil and finished with freshly grated parmesan.

We were overdue for a pizza night, so we also made pizzas (and that left a lot of pasta for lunches for the week!). The pizzas were barbecue chicken with jalapeños, lion’s mane mushroom, black garlic and truffle oil and a fresh fig, brie and balsamic that gave dessert vibes.

And we did a big Greek salad with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, oregano and goat feta. Absolutely lovely combination!

Fermented Radish Salsa & Dill Pickles

Summer brings a bit of a paradox with fermenting. There’s lots of produce that is so good when naturally lactose fermented, but warmer temperatures mean you can run into some issues!

I recently did a big batch of my favorite ferment, radish salsa. It uses red or purple skinned and white flesh radishes like French breakfast, red rover or cherry belle (daikon or watermelon are too dense), plus lots of lime, garlic, red onions and peppers. Plus cilantro if you have it, which I don’t right now.

A couple of days in, it kept getting a layer of Kahm yeast on top. Kahm yeast is a harmless strain of wild yeast that is a byproduct of fermentation. While harmless, it can negatively affect the flavor of the ferment. I have dealt with it most in the summer when my house is warmer and specifically with peppers. And I jammed a ton of picnic and bell peppers into this radish salsa, so I wasn’t surprised to see it on the radish salsa and not the dill cucumber pickles I did at the same time.

Luckily it’s just a surface growing yeast, so can easily be scraped off, but it’s annoying!

After scraping off and adding more brine to fill to the top of the lid and limit the oxygen exposure, I eventually moved the jar to the “lobby” of our walk in cooler where we store the eggs. This room stays at more like 65 degrees, whereas my house is at 75 and this lower temperature was just enough for it to finish fermenting to 8 days without more Kahm yeast growing!

The cucumber pickles are much faster to ferment, especially with the addition of honey to kickstart it, so they went in the fridge on day four, perfectly sour and delicious.

Spicy Beet Caraway Kraut

Since cabbage and beets are almost done (even in storage) for the season, I had to make another batch of beet kraut, too. I used two caraflex cabbages, the last of the red beets from River Queen Greens and some chioaggia beets, too.

I also grated some kohlrabi that needed to be used up in there and plenty of minced garlic. The seasonings were caraway, coriander and chili. I let it ferment for a week and to my shock, it ALSO developed Kahm yeast on top. I haven’t seen that with cabbage and beets before, but I guess it was warm enough and there was enough oxygen exposure for it to occur.

But it was plenty sour by day 7, so I scrapped it off and put it in the fridge and hopefully now with half gallons of dill pickles, bread & butter relish, kimchi, radish salsa, kraut and fermented hot sauce, I should be stocked up to take a break from fermenting and stop fighting Kahm yeast for a few months!

Fig Carrot Coconut Bread

I had an office day at the farm one day last week when we had plenty of leftovers and no real need to cook. Nothing was languishing in the fridge desperately needing to be used, either, except some overripe figs.

And yet, I couldn’t make it through the day without a cooking project — I got a little antsy in the afternoon and it really is the best kind of mental flow for me to cook or bake something.

So I made tiny batch of fig preserves for a carrot-fig-coconut quick bread. I also saved some of the fig preserves for future fig and bacon pizza.

I used some of the last of River Queen Greens’ yellow carrots, plus grated coconut and the fig preserves for the base/flavor of the bread, along with a little Barton Springs rye flour in addition to All Purpose. It came out really delicious and was lovely topped with pecan butter, too.