Add Tzatziki To Your Next Tuna Salad Sandwich For A Fresh Flair

Any vehicle for getting tzatziki sauce onto your tastebuds is A-okay in our book. Make that creamy, dreamy dressing do double-duty heavy-lifting, and use it to add some life to mild, predictable tuna salad. Tuna (especially canned tuna, a popular choice for homemade tuna salad) is simultaneously fishy and mild. As such, it performs best when it's both tempered and heightened — a seemingly paradoxical task — and that's where tzatziki sauce comes in. 

Tzatziki is a condiment popular in Mediterranean cuisine. It's typically made from chopped fresh dill, cucumber, garlic, and white vinegar or lemon juice, all married in a tangy, creamy base of full-fat Greek yogurt. Tzatziki sauce is commonly paired with gyros, kebabs, pita chips, and salads, and is even used as a topping for fish and seafood. But it also belongs in your tuna recipes.

Mayonnaise provides mild creaminess for your tuna salad, and so does tzatziki thanks to its yogurt base. Although, while that's where the story ends with mayo, tzatziki's herbaceous dill and cut of bright acidity from the lemon juice/vinegar work harder than mayonnaise for your tuna salad as a moisture element with both creaminess and dimensionality.

To incorporate tangy, garlicky, herbaceous, refreshing tzatziki sauce into your tuna salad sandwiches, just smear it on the bread. Or, for bolder tzatziki flavor, you could mix the sauce right into your tuna salad batch by swapping it out for the mayo. Or, to retain the rich texture that mayo provides, you could use a mixture of half mayo and half tzatziki.

For an envy-worthy work lunch, pack a tzatziki-smeared tuna salad sandwich with fresh Greek oregano, arugula, tomato, and a drizzle of lemon juice on whole wheat sourdough bread. You could also take another cue from the Mediterranean culinary style and spread tzatziki on pita triangles as the bread of your tuna salad sandwich. It doesn't have to just be sandwiches, either. If you mix that herbaceous tzatziki right into your tuna salad, you can bring bright, deep flavor to tuna salad on crackers, pretzels, carrots, celery, or — for an extra mouth-watering snack — potato chips. 

You can make your own tzatziki sauce at home in under 20 minutes with our classic tzatziki recipe, but the condiment is also widely available in many grocery stores near the refrigerated yogurt section. Pro tip: If you opt for the homemade route, let your tzatziki sauce sit in an airtight container in the fridge overnight or for at least 30 minutes to blend and amplify the flavors. In an airtight container in the fridge, that flavor-packed sauce will retain its quality for two days.