On Tahini: The sauce which goes well with everything, all hail the mighty tahini

The nice jar of tahini I got from Market Basket almost two months ago has served me well. I've spread it on sandwiches, put it into rice bowls, even butternut squash soup, and it's been an amazing addition. The most experimental and most rewarding attempt was when I put in a spoonful into a bowl of Shin Ramyun and dayuumm was that a good idea.

It's a pity I was afraid of it until this point, always choosing to make it from scratch than buying it, never really understanding the value of having a metric fuckton of it lying around as a raw ingredient. And it's really a thing of its own, something different from raw sesame or sesame oil. Add some canned chickpeas, garlic, olive oil, and you've got yourself hummus! Doesn't even have to be chickpeas. Any kind of beans really. The possibilities are endless.

In a sense, Tahini is quite like a whiter (spectrally speaking) version of gochujang, which is a bit more sour and spicy, but it goes with everything as  well. As I type this, I've been searching around, and some madlads have been making 'gochujang hummus' and yeah that sounds like a good idea, thank you for asking!

Making tahini is a dangerous endeavor on the other hand, the seeds are expensive, the recipes never quite accurate on how much water or oil you need, and the flavor...a little too disappointing after all the work you put into toasting the seeds. The toasting itself is a dangerous act, for the line between a toasty sesame seed and a burnt one is very thin. Then there's the question about the integrity of sesame seeds themselves, how old are they, are they flavorful, should they still be used, if the tahini is bad was it the seeds or the toasting or something else. Too many variables to control and get it right. The most annoying thing of all is, it's probably more expensive to buy sesame seeds and make the ingredient at home, than buying a large jar of it. Unfortunate but true.

I haven't tried it on savory pancakes. Yet. Seems like an easy enough goal.

Keep tuned in for more experiments here.