This vegan tzatziki is made with cashews, garlic, lemon juice, fresh herbs, and grated cucumber. It will add an ultra-creamy, tangy, and cool component to your meals, from grain bowls to roasted vegetables to vegan gyros or pita pockets. The tzatziki is also a refreshing and versatile dip.

The notion of a food or cooking rut doesn’t only apply to meals. It applies to condiments, too.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of tahini dressings, in any and all ways.

Likewise, I’ve written extensively about the many bean dips that I love, from smoky refried beans to lentil & pumpkin seed dip to hummus.

Recently, however, I’ve been craving a dip that’s especially refreshing for summer—something bright and cooling and creamy.

Vegan tzatziki, which is light enough to be a dressing yet substantial enough to be a dip, is the answer.

What is tzatziki?

Tzatiki is a yogurt-based dip that also contains cucumber, lemon juice, garlic and salt. Fresh herbs, such as dill, mint, or parsley, are nearly always incorporated.

Sometimes tzatziki contains olive oil, or is given a dash of olive oil right before serving.

While tzatziki is a great dip, it isn’t only served as a dip. It can be drizzled onto kebabs, gyro, or keftedes, which are a type of Greek meatball. In this sense, it’s very much a sauce as well.

My mom is first generation Greek American, and I grew up eating tzatziki.

I liked the coolness and creamy texture of the condiment, but most of all, I loved its lemony flavor. I’m a huge fan of tangy sauces and acidity in food.

Here was a dip/sauce that was rich and luscious, but super citrusy as well.

What makes this tzatziki recipe vegan?

In a word, cashews.

Soaked, unroasted cashews are the base ingredient for all of the cream-based sauces that enrich my dairy-free life.

When blended, cashews turn into an ultra-rich, mildly flavored, and silky smooth cream.

The most versatile and basic version of this is my all-purpose cashew cream.

More specialized cashew creams include my vegan mayonnaise with cashews, vegan ranch dressing, and 10-minute vegan ricotta cheese.

I also use soaked cashews to make an irresistable tangy, mildly salty vegan sour cream. And that flavor profile is precisely what’s needed for a homemade vegan tzatziki recipe.

Sour cream may not be an ingredient that comes to mind for a traditional Greek food, but believe me, it works here.

Sour cream is the base ingredient that makes my vegan tzatziki come to life. Once you prepare the cream, the rest of the recipe is easy.

You’ll mix the cashew sour cream with other components that are traditional for tzatziki—grated cucumber, salt, garlic, pepper, and dill—to create a very authentic, yet entirely plant-based, dip.

What if I don’t want to make homemade vegan sour cream?

If you’d like to avoid the step of blending up cashews, which is totally fair, then you can enlist some store-bought vegan products to help you out.

Tt’s fine to use either unsweetened, plain vegan yogurt or store-bought vegan sour cream instead.

Grating cucumber

I’ll walk you through steps for making the vegan tzatziki in just a moment. But first, I should say a little about grating cucumber for the recipe.

Grated cucumber is to thank for tzatziki’s characteristic taste, as well as it’s cooling, refreshing quality.

For my vegan tzatziki, I like to grate peeled, seeded cucumber on a handheld cheese grater.

If you’re intrigued, I can tell you that this kitchen gadget is inexpensive and can be very hard-working. Its setting, which is coarser than most microplane zesters, but more fine than most handheld box graters, is really useful.

For one thing, a handheld cheese grater creates beautiful wisps of carrot for vegan carrot cake, or perfectly-sized bits of zucchini for vegan zucchini bread.

If you’d like to zest citrus in larger pieces, whether for decoration or folding into baked goods, the gadget can take care of that job, too.

Of course, you can also use it to grate vegan cheese (such as the Violife wedge of vegan “parmesan”).

That sales pitch aside, if a box grater is what you have, then a box grater is fine, too!

Essentially, the aim here is to create very delicate pieces of cucumber, so that they can be easily mixed into the cashew sour cream. Tzatziki should have texture, but it’s not supposed to be chunky.

If you’re up to the task of very finely dicing your cucumber, that’s also a perfectly OK means of preparing the cucumber for mixing.

How to make vegan tzatziki

The steps in making this homemade dip/sauce/dressing are really simple.

Step 1: Soak your cashews

Soaking cashew nuts helps to soften them, which in turn makes it easier to blend them. I used to think it was only possible to make cashew-based sauces with a super high-speed blender. With enough soaking time, a regular blender will probably be up to the task.

I recommend soaking your cashews for at least two hours, ideally up to four.

If you’d like to expedite the process, just soak them in hot water instead of room temperature or cold. Thirty minutes of soaking in hot water should do the trick.

Step 2: Prepare the cashew sour cream

This is as simple as adding ingredients (soaked cashews, water, salt, lemon, lime) to a food processor or blender and blending till smooth.

You can prepare the sour cream up to two days before making the whole vegan tzatziki recipe.

Step 3: Prepare the cucumber

Before you grate the cucumber, you’ll want to peel it and remove some of its seeds. I suggest a seedless cucumber for the recipe, but a slicing cucumber is also fine, so long as you get some of the seeds out.

To do this, peel the cucumber, then halve it lengthwise. Use a small spoon to scrape out whatever seeds are present in the middle. Then, grate the cucumber.

Finally, it’s helpful to wring some moisture out of the cucumber, in order to get a thick, creamy (not watery) dip.

To do this, tlace the grated cucumber into a fine-mesh sieve and press on it to expel as much moisture as possible; alternatively, you can squeeze it through a cheesecloth. 

Step 3: Stir in the remaining ingredients

These remaining ingredients are:

• Grated cucumber
• Salt
• Finely minced garlic
• Additional lemon juice
• Chopped fresh dill
• Chopped fresh mint leaves

Just use a spoon or a small spatula to fold it all together. When the dip looks evenly mixed, it’s ready to go.

Step 4: Serve or store

At this point, you can enjoy the vegan tzatziki right away. You can also store it in an airtight container in the fridge for up to four days.

Does tzatziki freeze well?

To be honest, I expected the answer of this question to be no, but I discovered that it’s a yes.

When I was testing this recipe to write about it, I froze a few batches of my dip in small mason jars (which is how I usually freeze extra portions of big batches of dressing).

My fear was that the cucumber would turn slimy with defrosting. On the contrary, defrosted jars of the tzatziki tasted fresh and had a normal texture. Win!

Serving vegan tzatziki

This is a lovely recipe to serve for snacking or hors d’oeuvres if you’re entertaining. It’s such a great dipper for crisp, raw crudités, and I like it with crackers, too.

If you’d like to use it as a sauce, here are some recipes that I’d gladly drizzle it onto the roasted vegetable pearl couscous salad that I wrote about recently.

It would also be wonderful to serve as an accompaniment to my oven-roasted balsamic eggplant cubes or stewed eggplant tomato lentils. Tzatziki and eggplant are a match made in summery heaven!

If you’ve got a recipe for vegan gyros that you love, the tzatziki is a perfect topping for them. (And if you don’t, there’s a recipe in my cookbook The Vegan Week that I love and make often.)

It also works well with grilled vegetable or tofu kebabs.

Finally, I’m dying to use this in place of the tahini dressing for my cumin-spiced lentils and rice. Such a simple recipe, and this would take it to a new level.

I’ll look forward to hearing about about how you choose to serve this recipe. I’m sure you’ll think of smart uses that haven’t occurred to me.

I’m really no more of an authority on Greek cooking than anyone else. My Yaya’s dishes were certainly a part of my childhood, but truthfully, I wish I had taken more time to actually learn from her.

Whenever I do manage to create a plant-based version of a traditional Greek dish, like my favorite vegan avgolemono soup or the vegan koulourakia cookies I posted this spring, I feel glad about it.

And I’m happy to be adding vegan tzatziki to the mix.

Enjoy it!

xo