I don’t know how many of you have ever tried tahini straight off the spoon. It’s sesame butter as in peanut butter, right, and sesame seed is wonderful on rolls and stuff……
Except in tahini, it’s not. Tahini grabs for every bit of saliva in your mouth and tastes really foul and sticks to your denture like well, there’s nothing I know to compare it with. I always wondered what it added to hummus and I have experimented with peanut oil and peanut butter with some success, especially among kids. Also. tahini separates out into oil and solids, and it’s hell to get out of the jar. Expensive, too.
The other day I was in Lim Chhour’s shop in Henderson – wonderful Asian supply shop and good for economical meat and veg, and I came across a bottle of toasted sesame seed oil. Note the “toasted“. A 750ml bottle was just under $13, and I hummed and hahed a bit before it went into the basket. Something new to play with. Did I deserve it?
Today, I made the first batch of hummus with it, using 60 ml of sesame oil instead of the 30-40ml of tahini I would normally use. It just looked a touch less substantial than tahini so I decided to boost it’s presence a little, as it were.
