Tarator Sauce Recipe: The Indispensable for Calamari

Once you’ve mastered cooking calamari perfectly at home, the next step is to explore different sauces to serve alongside. The most well-known and intriguing sauce often served with calamari is the tarator sauce.

Although cooking calamari to achieve a tender inside and crispy outside is quite easy, many people hesitate to cook it at home due to a lack of well-published resources on the topic. For this, after properly marinating the calamari, paying attention to key points while cooking and being able to say “yes, this is it,” I recommend reading our article titled ‘How to Marinate Calamari?’. Since tarator sauce can be easily prepared with ingredients in your home and is delicious, it is one of the most commonly served sauces alongside calamari. The essence of tarator sauce consists of stale bread crumbs, strained yogurt, and walnuts. Other ingredients are used to enhance the taste and aroma.

After preparing the tarator sauce, I suggest letting it sit in the refrigerator for a few hours if you have time. This will allow the sauce to develop its flavor fully.

Ingredients

2-3 slices of stale bread

A handful of walnuts

2 tablespoons strained yogurt

1 tablespoon mayonnaise (you can increase the yogurt instead of mayonnaise if you prefer)

2 cloves of garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 lemon

1 teaspoon salt

Preparation

Crumble the inside of the stale bread slices into a bowl.

Use a food processor to blend walnuts, yogurt, mayonnaise, 2 cloves of garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt together.

If you’re not using a food processor, you can crumble the bread between your palms. After crushing the walnuts and garlic, mix them with all the ingredients. Your tarator sauce is ready. I recommend letting it rest in the refrigerator for a few hours before serving it alongside calamari.

Enjoy your meal!