Tahini Sauce With Garlic and Lemon

Tahini is one of the most recognizable staples of Middle Eastern cuisine, a wonderfully nutty paste created by grinding sesame seeds. And it has a long history: According to Jewish cookbook author Adeena Sussman, tahini was first cited as a culinary ingredient in the 13th-century Iraqi cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, and over the centuries has become widely-used throughout the Levant, Turkey, Middle East, and beyond. That said, its precise origins are about as easy to pin down as those of hummus, the dip in which ground sesame seeds play an important supporting role.

Tahini is also extremely popular as a sauce all its own. In Israel, it’s commonly mixed with water, lemon juice, salt, and often garlic before being drizzled over everything from falafel and sabich to roasted vegetables, meatballs, and anything else that benefits from its savory (and mildly bitter) touch. 

Perhaps you’ve been making tahini sauce for years, however, and now you’re thinking, “It’s a pretty simple concept, what new technique could the acclaimed chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author Michael Solomonov possibly teach me about something that requires just a few simple ingredients? And while I’m thinking about it, do any of his friends call him Mike Solo?”

We don’t know the answer to the second question, but we can address the first: Yes, the acclaimed chef Michael Solomonov does have a revelatory technique for making tahini sauce that’s likely new to you, and it produces a condiment that’s airy in texture and richly garlicky in flavor without being overpowering. The trick? Blending lemon juice with an entire head of garlic cloves—peels and all—until a pulpy mash is formed; it’s then pushed through a sieve into a large bowl before the rest of the ingredients are whisked in. 

During this blending and straining process, the lemon juice works furiously to denature the allinase, a compound in garlic that, when cloves are cut or smashed, reacts with another compound called allicin to create the raw garlic flavor we all know and love (or hate, depending on the context). This aggressive tempering of the garlic is how you can get away with using 20 cloves of garlic in proportion to just one cup of tahini, some cold water, cumin, and salt. 

Does this tahini sauce take slightly more effort than the standard one? It is. But we can confidently say Mike Solo’s method is absolutely worth it.