we travel full-time all around the world filming and eating the most
incredible street food but right now we're home in New Zealand in quarantine
so we want to bring that street food experience back into the home kitchen
and recreate some of the foods that we've eaten all around the world today
we're recreating a dish that we ate in Athens Greece
now we ate this incredible meal at a family-run steak house and it's all
about juicy smoky pork cooked on the grill served with a hot salad made up
of tomatoes and feta and peppers and then served with super crunchy golden
chips it was the most quintessential Greek meal
sitting in that Greek summer sun and I cannot wait to recreate this one here in
New Zealand I'm Thomas and I'm Sheena and we're Chasing a Plate let's get
cooking
when we had this meal in Athens it was just a fantastic experience it was a
very simple meal so a simple meal in the best possible way take great ingredients
cook them well and just let the ingredients shine and Greece is just
it's such a sunny warm place you've got these beautiful fruits and vegetables
and it's summertime or it's the end of summer in New Zealand right now so we've
got some beautiful ingredients to use while we're cooking this but this was
essentially a steak house so a Greek steak house they only served pork just
beautifully cooked over this giant pit of charcoal but the thing they did is
they pounded that pork so it was very very thin before it went on the grill
now we don't have a meat tenderizer or a meat hammer so I've just got a normal
hammer from the toolbox we've put a bit of cling film on there just to
protect it from the actual hammer but we've got the pork and it's time to
pound it out so we've got some pork shoulder steaks here some beautiful fat
running all through there and we just need to pound it so you can see it's
quite thick at the moment we need to get it nice and pounded out and get it as
big as possible so the bits at the restaurant were big I mean they were
starting quite small and as they pounded them out we ended up with some huge bits
of pork on our plates so let's pound this out and get it nice and flat and
tenderized
the pork steaks came off the grill and then straight onto a huge pile of chips
so we've got to make chips here today so I'm just peeling the spuds and then cut
them up into some chip shapes
now I'm going to parboil the potatoes so I've got a pot of salted boiling water
and they're just going to go in for a few minutes now at the restaurant they
would have just deep-fried the oww deep fried the potatoes but we don't have
enough oil to deep fry so they're going straight into the oven after par boiling
it's time to work on the salad so this salad just blew us away it was
the perfect accompaniment to the pork steaks it's made up of feta tomatoes
pepperoncini peppers bit of olive oil and oregano and the way the restaurant
served it was really neat so they cooked the salad it's a hot salad over charcoal
so they popped all of the ingredients in a really thin layer on
the silver tray and then popped it directly over the charcoals and then
grabbed the silver tray and served it at the table so what we're going to do is
just chop up the tomatoes we've got a bit of feta we don't have pepperoncini
peppers but we do have jalapenos so we're going to substitute those for the
pepperoncini peppers we're going to dice up the tomatoes and then get them on that tray
the timer has just gone off for the potatoes I had them in for six or seven
minutes I think and then I'm gonna just whip them into a strainer so we don't
want those to overcook oh steamy
let's get these tomatoes onto the tray so I
just cut them up in a really rough dice chunky dice so remember with these
recreations we're not following a recipe we're just thinking back on what we
tasted and what the environment was like and what we actually saw when we were
eating at the restaurants or at the street stalls at that time and then
trying to recreate it at home so I've chucked that onto the plate now um
tonnes of feta it had lots of feta bubbling in amongst that tomato so I'm
just going to sort of crumble it over this is quite a creamy feta
we're using jalapenos instead of the pepperoncini peppers that they used
at the restaurant and these are super spicy these little babies the ones that
we ate in the dish weren't spicy at all they were really mild actually quite
sweet so I'm not going to go too crazy with these jalapenos and now I reckon
just a glug of olive oil and then a squidge of salt and pepper some black
pepper there's not much coming out of there and then to top it all off a really
important ingredient in Greek cooking oregano so this is not Greek oregano
I don't believe Greek oregano is a lot stronger so we
might just add a little bit more than we usually would of this dried oregano oh it
smells really fragrant and beautiful I've spread the ingredients really
thinly onto the plate and it's exactly like it was at the restaurant so they
cooked the plate of food right on the charcoal so the whole plate was resting
on the charcoals and when they took the plate off of the grill and set it at the
table it was just bubbling away all the cheese
had melted all the tomatoes had oozed their juices out onto the plate and so
it was a beautiful bubbling mess and that's what we're hoping will happen
with this plate
the potatoes have dried out a bit and
now they need to be coated in oil and salt before they get whipped into the
oven
I have cranked up the barbecue first thing I'm gonna get on is this salad so
we're using gas that's all we've got access to here we don't have an
incredible pit of charcoal like they had I really enjoyed watching them
cooking in Athens on that massive charcoal grill they had but it's gas
for us let's get that salad on hopefully that starts bubbling away
soon and then I need to prepare that steak which I hammered out earlier so
those pork steaks I'm just gonna oil them a tiny bit and put a little bit of
oregano on now we did not see if they did or didn't do this but there was
definitely some oregano on the meat when it came to the table so we figure there
was just a little bit of oiling and a little bit of seasoning so we'll just
get a little bit of oil rub it all over these nice thin steaks and then a little
bit of oregano in the mix dried oregano again and I'll just move it over all
the steaks
look how this salad's coming up so it's bubbling away beautifully that's had
about 10 or 15 minutes now just sitting on the hot flame and it's time to get
the pork on there so let's get this pork straight onto the grill oh yeah get that
sizzle going get that cooked right up now I loved watching this on the
charcoal at the restaurant so they were pounding it super thin getting it on
their big charcoal pit and he was turning it a lot while I was watching
him cook it so he wasn't just sitting it flipped it once he was playing with it a
lot so I'm gonna play around get this cooked up
I am super happy with how these pork steaks look so beautiful and golden on
the barbecue and look at that salad the way the olive oil is in there and a
little bit of oil's come out of the cheese let's plate this up exactly like
we had it in Athens so pile the steaks over the chips that have just
come out of the oven look at that salad inside
let's get eating
I've gotta say that this meal looks pretty legit and the only thing missing
is a huge wedge of lemon which the restaurant just plopped straight on top
of the meat now we're in quarantine we're in lockdown
we have no lemons in the house but what we do have is some zesty lemon juice from
a bottle make do with what you can find now I've just realized there is
something else missing from this meal I'm gonna liberally splash lemon juice
over that lot cold beers oh yes so in Greece you've gotta have a beer
with your meal and this meal is just made made for cold beers so let's
pop into these that's very nifty all right a couple of beers cheers
now all right let's see this was such a pleasurable meal in Athens it was are you
gonna take this oh sorry I was staring at the chips
it was such a lovely environment sitting right on the street
eating this and it was a great memory to have so let's see how it is at home if
we've managed to recreate the dish I'm gonna go with everything pork chip the
salads a little bit more crispy dry and crispy than the one they gave us that
had more moisture going on
nailed it, it's really good
there's a big standout difference and that's the jalapenos they are a
very strong flavor sharp spicy the the true dish in Athens wasn't like that it
was a sweeter more mild flavor and the tomatoes in Athens were so much juicier
really plump the resulting salad was really sort of um juicy juicy yeah
this is a little bit crunchy almost crispy but the flavours are good
it is still an amazing salad I
would do that again happily but it's it's a little bit different to what
we're going for but this though the meat has come up
beautifully this is well worth doing here I'm gonna have a meat and chip this time hmm
the oregano flavour
and the chips have come up very well so we weren't able to deep-fry them don't
have a deep fryer don't have enough oil anyway but they've come up very well in
the oven wow I put enough oil so that they were basically shallow frying in
the oven and they've come up really crispy soft on the inside the meat
contracted a little on the grill right? yeah a bit more than expected I knew it
would shrink up a bit but it shrunk up a bit more than expected but it's actually
texturally is very much like what we had it's taking me back to Athens honestly
where we sat on the street digging into this really hearty food that was
using the best produce available you could taste the quality in Greece
the ingredients were so phenomenal hmm but I don't reckon we've done a bad job this
is a super cool one to recreate and a perfect meal and great with a cold beer
cheers
heaps more street food recreations coming to you on this
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