Tahini sauce: The basic recipe
Nothing works in the Levant without tahini sauce! After all, what would a falafel wrap be without the creamy, nutty sauce? It is part of some Levantine cuisine classics. I’ll show you how you can make it yourself quickly and easily with just a few ingredients.
How delicious it tastes
Tahini, lemon, garlic and parsley make tahini sauce in no time at all. Incidentally, this sauce is called Tarratohr in Lebanon. It tastes slightly nutty and yet wonderfully fresh. The lemon gives the sauce a wonderful acidity and the parsley slightly offsets the strong garlic.
The ingredients for a creamy sauce
For a good tahini sauce, you naturally need good tahini. You can make the tahini yourself or buy it – it’s quicker. When buying, make sure that you don’t use sesame paste where the oil and paste have separated. The paste will settle at the bottom of the jar while the oil floats on top. You then have to stir everything together vigorously and the paste often tastes slightly bitter.
If you prefer to make the sauce a little milder, use fresh or pickled garlic, as it is not as spicy.
It is important to use fresh ingredients, as the sauce will not taste good with lemon juice concentrate and parsley from the freezer!
Ingredients for tahini sauce:
- tahini
- garlic
- lemon
- flat-leaf parsley
- water
- salt and pepper
How to make your own tahini sauce
The ingredients are quick to get and the preparation doesn’t take long either. You can enjoy the creamy, spicy sauce within 10 minutes.
- Crush the garlic in a mortar or grate finely with a grater.
- Squeeze the lemon and chop the parsley.
- In a bowl, mix the garlic paste with the tahini and lemon juice.
- The mixture will start to thicken, so add the water little by little. Sometimes you need a little more, sometimes a little less.
- Add the chopped parsley and season with salt and pepper.
For even quicker preparation, you can also put all the ingredients except the parsley in a food processor and blend or puree until creamy using a hand blender. Only add the parsley after blending, otherwise your sauce will turn green and the taste will change.
The finished tahini sauce will keep for a few days in a sealed jar in the fridge.
What does the sesame sauce go with?
Tarratohr goes fantastically with falafel or shawarma, but also with grilled meat, e.g. kafta and fried vegetables.
Or you can use the sauce as a dressing for salads. You can use it to spice up shirazi salad, for example. It also tastes great as an alternative to hollandaise – try it with baked asparagus!
I hope I was able to make the tahini sauce tasty for you and that you try it out straight away! Have fun with it and bon appétit.
Tahini sauce: The basic recipe
Ingredients
- 85 g Tahini
- 1 Garlic clove
- 1/2 Lemon
- 1 handful Flat leaf parsley
- 100 ml Water or more according to taste. It depends on the tahini used.
- Salt, pepper
Zubereitung
- Peel the garlic clove and crush it with the salt in a mortar.
- Squeeze the lemon.
- Chop the parsley.
- In a bowl, mix the garlic-salt mixture with the tahini.
- Add the juice of half a lemon and mix together. The mixture will now behave a little strangely: The tahini reacts with the lemon – and the mixture stiffens.
- Now add the water and mix everything well with a fork. The sauce is now liquid and creamy.
- Now add the chopped parsley and taste the sauce again with salt and pepper as needed. One serving yields approx. 250 ml.
