Daily Dose of English 121
(American) Greek Food
Daily Dose of English 121
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about American Greek food, because I haven't done one of these little food episode thingies for, oh, like a week. Okay, no, it's been like nine days. But before that, it was a while, so I sort of forgot about it. Yeah, and I think also, I also forgot a little bit about the accent episode, or episodes where I was gonna talk about different accents, but you know what? I'm remembering that now. We're gonna go back to it. I think tomorrow we'll do another episode talking about an accent, because if you don't remember what I'm talking about, back in episode, what was it? Let me find it here. In episode 80, I talked about British English, Southern Standard British English, RP, it's also known as. And I said I would do some of these and I never did. So it's been over a month since then because this episode is 121. So I think tomorrow we'll come back into another accent episode. But anyways, today we're talking about American Greek food. And honestly, one of the reasons that I stopped sort of thinking about these episodes of these like American styles of foreign foods is that I've kind of talked about all of the foods that are really prevalent and really common in the US because There's a lot of more local things, right? For example, in New York, there's a lot of Jamaican food. There's a lot of everything food in New York, honestly. But in the entire country, there's not that many other cuisines that are well known. And so like there's really only that list of whatever like six I did, right? There's, let's see, I talked about Chinese food, Indian food, Thai food, Japanese food, Mexican food. And those are the ones that I would say like stick out in people's minds when they think of, uh like foreign food right there's not you can definitely find other restaurants let me be clear right you can find a restaurant like an argentinian grill or a colombian kitchen or something like that you can also find german restaurants and things but it's just not nearly as common oh i guess i did forget about italian food so we'll have to talk about that as well let's do that in let's do that in a week i'll put it down on my calendar right now uh american Italian food. We'll talk about that one for sure. That's a common one. But there's just not that much else that I can think of. And if we think about like foreign food that is really popular like everywhere. Because you can find Indian restaurants in pretty much every single American city. You can find Mexican restaurants in every single American city. But there's just not that many other countries that are that widely represented. So, I'll be getting into cuisines that I know a little less about or that are just less common, and so I'm going to have to talk a little bit more about personal experience. I think there's enough to talk about Greek food that it's pretty general, but like when I talk about dim sum or Cantonese food, for example, that is going to be more specific to my experience rather than everybody in the U.S. has had this, because actually it's relatively uncommon for a lot of people to eat food like that. And I have plenty of things to talk about my experience as an American trying food from all over the world. I've gone to a lot of different restaurants because I like food so much. And so I'll probably talk about German food and Swiss food and British food. What else comes to mind for Ethiopian food? Fantastic, by the way. I'm sure more things come to mind. But anyways, today we're talking about Greek food, starting at halfway through the episode. Like I said, there's not that much Greek food in the U.S. There's a lot more located in specific parts of the U.S. And I think it's most common in New England, which is the part of the U.S., sort of the Northeast, where New York is and that sort of section up there. Um, and I think it's more common there, but it, it's like, you can find it in a lot of places, but most specifically you can find, uh, euros are or gyros or however you want to pronounce it. But I've almost always heard it called a euro, which is J Y R O. and they're sort of a Greek sandwich wrapped in sort of a flat bread and then filled with various stuff to make a delicious sort of wrap sandwich thing. And that is by far the most popular thing to find for Greek food. And it's like, when I think of Greek food in like the US, that's really all that comes to mind. Like a couple of other things like salads, but like, I don't even know if that's Greek. It just, we sort of might call it like a Greek salad or whatever and think about olives or something, but gyros are pretty much the Greek food that we think of. There are Greek diners, especially like if you go into New England, like I said, where you can find a lot more different kinds of Greek food and they. And they're quite good, right? Most food in the world can be really good or really bad, but most of the Greek food that I've had, I've enjoyed and liked. Especially, I think that gyros top that. It's the reason they're so popular, they're really good. And the thing that I like about them, and kind of a lot of wraps or sandwiches in general, is because they have a lot of different things going on, which make the food really interesting. And so I want to look at a Euro so I don't forget anything. Let me Google it really quick. Yeah, so it all starts with a nice thick but also thin piece of flatbread, which is usually fluffy and has a nice I want to say body to it. That's something we often use to describe food is something that has body means that there's like texture to it. It doesn't just fall apart. It's got body to it. I don't really know how to explain it. And then there's usually some vegetables on it, right? So like some cucumbers or tomatoes, red onions are really good. And they kind of usually add like a barrier between that. And then you have sauces and meat, essentially. Like that's sort of the entire sandwich. They're pretty simple. But the meat can get really spiced and delicious, and there's a lot of different ways to prepare it. You can also, if you're a vegetarian, you can have it be with falafel. There's many different ways to do it, but I think the most typical is with lamb, which is very good. And lamb, spiced lamb on a gyro, but I actually don't know. That's just what I think of when I think of eating gyro. And then the sauce though, the sauce is where the magic happens, which is kind of true in a lot of food. The sauce really makes the sandwich. Because in Euro sauce, usually in kind of a lot of food from that region of the world has a yogurt based sauce, which is So it's got like yogurt, it's the base of the sauce, plus then you added a bunch of extra things. Maybe it's cucumber, dill, olive oil, salt. There's a lot of different things that you can put in. I don't know what's traditional, but that's what I think of is usually just a simple like soury, tangy sauce that combines really well with the lamb. And that's the real core to eating a gyro, in my opinion, is that it has a nice, thick, creamy sauce that really just stands out and makes the rest of the ingredients taste really good. And yeah, that's pretty much all that I have to say about Greek food. I do not have very many other opinions or honestly that much knowledge about it. So I'm actually gonna branch off a little bit into other similar foods because We end up grouping a lot of foods like this together in the US. So gyros and falafel sandwiches kind of get grouped together because they end up being, in our minds, pretty similar. There's not really a huge difference between a gyro and a falafel sandwich from a totally different country because they end up looking and tasting really quite similar. The quality more depends on the restaurant. And so I'm specifically thinking of actually a pretty famous falafel restaurant in New York called the Halal Guys. I'm gonna look it up. Halal Guys, oop, I spelled guys wrong. How do I, how did I do that? It's so easy to spell. And it's very similar base, but then they typically add rice, I think, and it's often in bowls instead of in a sandwich form. But that's like the main difference. And They're also really good, and I specifically think of the sauces. I've even seen recipes online for people remaking the sauces because their sauces are really, really good. And so I definitely recommend eating any kind of that food that you can find where it's like the flatbread base instead of like sandwich bread that you might think of. And then spiced meat with a yogurt based sauce is what I'm generally thinking of here. But anyways, I know this episode actually didn't talk that much about Greek food, but I hope that you enjoy it or enjoyed it. And I thank you so very much for listening to this episode. Um, and tomorrow we're going to get back to the accent thing. I'll just have to figure out what accent to talk about, but anyways, I'll see you then. Have a good one. Bye.
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