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"Several people claim to have brought gyros to Chicago and been the first to mass-produce them. George Apostolou claims he served the first gyros at the Parkview Restaurant in 1965. In 1974, he opened a 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) manufacturing plant called Central Gyros Wholesale. Peter Parthenis claims he mass-produced them at Gyros Inc., in 1973, a year before Apostolou.[7] In 1968, at The Parthenon restaurant, Chris Liakouras developed an early version of the modern vertical rotisserie gyros cooker, and popularized gyros by passing out samples free to customers.[11] The vertical broiler was later refined by Tom Pappas and others at Gyros incorporated. Pappas would go on to develop the modern commercial recipe for gyros in the United States, achieving success as an independent manufacturer of gyros in Florida during the early 1980s, and popularizing it in the southeastern US (Orlando Sentinel, 1981). They have since spread to all parts of the country, but the gyro is still identified as part of Chicago's working class cuisine."
Virtually all gyros in the states are manufactured in Chicago or by companies with Greek-Chicago roots and each company has their own recipe. In the Chicago area, you can buy frozen pre-sliced gyro meat and make your own sandwich at home. The spices in the meat can include garlic, rosemary, thyme, oregano, cumin, marjoram and pepper. It should be noted that gyros is often made with a combo of beef and lamb.
To give you an idea of how embedded gyros are in Chicago culture/cuisine, here is a poster someone made combining dozens of Gyros advertisements around Chicago.
"Several people claim to have brought gyros to Chicago and been the first to mass-produce them. George Apostolou claims he served the first gyros at the Parkview Restaurant in 1965. In 1974, he opened a 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) manufacturing plant called Central Gyros Wholesale. Peter Parthenis claims he mass-produced them at Gyros Inc., in 1973, a year before Apostolou.[7] In 1968, at The Parthenon restaurant, Chris Liakouras developed an early version of the modern vertical rotisserie gyros cooker, and popularized gyros by passing out samples free to customers.[11] The vertical broiler was later refined by Tom Pappas and others at Gyros incorporated. Pappas would go on to develop the modern commercial recipe for gyros in the United States, achieving success as an independent manufacturer of gyros in Florida during the early 1980s, and popularizing it in the southeastern US (Orlando Sentinel, 1981). They have since spread to all parts of the country, but the gyro is still identified as part of Chicago's working class cuisine."
Virtually all gyros in the states are manufactured in Chicago or by companies with Greek-Chicago roots and each company has their own recipe. In the Chicago area, you can buy frozen pre-sliced gyro meat and make your own sandwich at home. The spices in the meat can include garlic, rosemary, thyme, oregano, cumin, marjoram and pepper. It should be noted that gyros is often made with a combo of beef and lamb.
To give you an idea of how embedded gyros are in Chicago culture/cuisine, here is a poster someone made combining dozens of Gyros advertisements around Chicago.
Almost 400 gyros signs/images were collected as part of the Chicago Gyros Project...so yes. at least 10,000,000 Americans love their Lamb! Interesting Ideas: The Gyros Project
I guess I'd better visit Chicago! Never knew it was so popular there....I buy lamb alot and people always ask me how do I cook it....a good friend asked me if I boil it -yuk...She had never tried it so I made lamb slow cooked on my BBQ and she loved it!
If you open your mind, listen and think you'll be able to learn things, too minibrings! Maybe you should try to learn about just one country to start with? You can do it!
Pot kettle black. Stop with the generalizations and constant americans are idiots diatribe. Thats all i'm trying to tell you. . Once when i said we should agree to disagree you continued to be insistent that you were right.. So please have an open mind.. preach what you professed above.
Btw I've lived in 6 countries and have multiple citizenships so i know about multiple countries. Have you ever seen me say all aussies are idiots or racists? I avoid majing generalizations about entire groups of people.. Thats one lesson i can hope to shate with you if you actually are able to open your mind, as you profess.
Last edited by minibrings; 02-07-2014 at 09:52 AM..
Well, with my flame suit on, Americans probably have the blandest most over-processed diets in the world. American "cheese" says a lot about the American palate.
Is it more or less common alongside the others like beef, chicken or pork?
Americans don't eat lamb as often as beef, chicken or pork and some don't really eat it much at all, but do Australians or New Zealanders usually eat it about as commonly as those meats?
In Australia, yes. I buy MSA lamb most weeks and bulk buy trays of chops and other cuts from Costco or Aldi. I find it well textured, tender and with little fat (but then I only ever buy MSA meat). Whatever cut I buy it usually ends up BBQ'd one way or another.
In New Zealand, no. Lamb is too expensive and all the good quality meat gets reserved for export. We hardly had any lamb there and what we did have I wasn't impressed by.
When I was in Sydney for three months, lamb was definitely more prevalent on supermarket shelves than in the US. This goes for both variety and the sheer size of the selection. Needless to say, I was happy about this, as was the case with the ease in which I was able to find goat meat!
Here in the US I grew up with Sunday roast either being beef or lamb but nowadays you can hardly find lamb in the grocery store. When you do find it, it's really expensive and that's why we don't eat it.
However we found some on sale, put it in the freezer, and had roast lamb for Thanksgiving dinner along with the traditional mint sauce. It was delicious.
Do you make your own mint sauce? I've been growing different varieties of mints (chocolate, apple, garden) and am looking for good recipes for sauce and jelly.
My Mum always cooked a roast on Sundays. Her lamb roast was so delicious with all trimmings including mint sauce. I was never very fond of any other lamb cuts though, just the roast. On one particularly homesick day I bought a couple of lamb chops. They were disgusting, greasy and foul tasting. Put me off lamb completely. Of course it wasn't NZ lamb, it was Australian. When I was in Oz I found the meat there tasted quite different from NZ meat. I guess they use different feed than we do. I have not seen any NZ lamb anywhere I've been in New England.
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we found some on sale, put it in the freezer, and had roast lamb for Thanksgiving dinner along with the traditional mint sauce. It was delicious.
