FavorFlavs #15

We all have them: favorite flavors, ingredients and kitchen tools. FavorFlavs we always reach for (again). These are ours.

Tahini

Versatility is a good quality if you want to make it to FavorFlav status. Take tahini (tahini, tachina or techina), sesame seed paste. An indispensable ingredient in that other FavorFlav hummus (chickpea salad), baba ghanoush (aubergine salad) and halva (pastry from Turkey and surrounding regions). As you can already infer from these examples, it’s a typically Middle Eastern ingredient.

That doesn’t stop us from also adding it to salad dressing, cake, on bread (with chocolate spread), drizzling it over roasted vegetables à la Ottolenghi, and stirring it into our yogurt in the morning. In the latter case, exclusively the white variety. Because tahini has its own snobbery too: the brown kind tastes a touch more bitter. And that makes it considerably less versatile in use.

Available at the (Turkish) supermarket.

Text: Marjan Ippel
Image: Danique de Bruijn