Pork Gyros in Flatbread with Tzatziki

Start with the marinade. Garlic, cumin, coriander, paprika, chilli, and the dried trio of thyme, oregano, rosemary - this is a Mediterranean spice logic, not a Middle Eastern one: earthy and warm rather than hot. Two hours is the lower bound because that's roughly how long it takes salt and acid-free spice paste to move a few millimetres into thin-sliced meat by diffusion alone - there's no vinegar or lemon here doing fast chemical work, so don't expect a 20-minute marinade to do anything. Twenty-four hours and the garlic starts to dominate and the texture softens further, which some people like and some find a bit much. Either end works; there's no magic cutoff at exactly two hours, it's just where the flavour starts registering on the tongue rather than sitting on the surface.

Pork neck (shoulder, if your butcher calls it that) is the right cut because it's seamed with fat and connective tissue that renders during a fast cook instead of seizing up. Loin or tenderloin would be leaner and would dry out in the same two minutes that render the neck juicy - if that's what you have, cut it even thinner and pull it off the heat the second it loses pink, don't wait for colour. Chicken thigh works by the same logic for the same reason people do chicken gyros: dark meat, forgiving fat content, same thin-slice treatment.

Fry in olive oil, but the oil here isn't a seasoning, it's just the heat conductor - any oil with no smell of its own and a reasonably high smoke point does the job just as well: sunflower, groundnut. If your extra virgin olive oil is the good peppery stuff you save for salads, don't burn it in a hot pan, it won't taste of itself by the time it's done anyway and you'll waste the thing that makes it good.

A kazan or a Greek taverna uses a vertical spit so the fat bastes down through the meat continuously and the outside gets proper live-fire char. A domestic hob can't replicate the char - be honest with yourself about that - but it can replicate the thin-slice-fast-sear logic perfectly well, which is actually the part that matters for juiciness. A wide, heavy frying pan is your stand-in kazan; crowd it and the meat steams instead of frying, so do it in batches if your pan isn't big enough for 400g to sit in a single layer.

The cucumber for the tzatziki gets the same treatment twice over - seeds scooped out, then grated and salted and left to sit before being squeezed dry in a sieve. Cucumber is almost entirely water locked inside cell walls; salt draws that water out by osmosis before it has the chance to leak out later into your yoghurt and thin it to soup. Skip this step and by the time the flatbread's assembled, the tzatziki has turned to drizzle. Greek yoghurt itself is already strained of its whey, which is why it holds body here - a thin natural yoghurt will need straining through muslin for an hour first if that's what's in your fridge, or the whole sauce collapses.

The rest - lettuce, tomato, raw red onion, parsley, a second hit of raw cucumber - isn't decoration, it's temperature and texture contrast: cool and crisp against hot meat and thick sauce. Some say gyros needs pitta specifically, as if any other flatbread is a betrayal - no, because pitta's only real job is to be pliable enough to fold without cracking and sturdy enough not to split under a wet filling; a wrap, a naan, even a good soft tortilla warmed through does the same structural job. Warm the bread properly before you fill it, dry cold bread cracks exactly where you need it to bend.

Feeds four as a proper lunch or light dinner, one flatbread each, and don't be shy with the tzatziki - it's cheap to make more of if you're feeding bigger appetites.