Tahini Sauce - The Plant Based School (2024)

Tahini sauce is a creamy, nutty, healthy condiment from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines.

It has a gracefully pourable consistency and a gorgeous, velvety-smooth texture.

You’ll love it as a salad dressing, dip, or drizzle on your favorite Mediterranean meal.

Tahini sauce is a creamy Middle Eastern and Mediterranean condiment made with tahini, fresh lemon juice, water, salt, and crushed garlic.

It’s ridiculously easy to make – whisk everything together – yet it’s creamy, versatile, and nutritious, and it is by far the most popular condiment in our home.

Try it with hummus, warm pita bread, and falafel, or let it drizzle gracefully on chickpea fritters and lentil patties.

Its heavenly creaminess will upgrade any salad, grain bowl, and meze platter.

We recommend it with Shirazi salad, Tabouli, and our Mediterranean bowl for a perfect flavor-texture combination.

Its rich dairy-like mouthfeel (there’s no dairy in it), distinct nuttiness from the sesame seeds, and very slightly bitter undertones balanced by the freshness of the lemon make it a charming and sophisticated addition to your dinner table.

It pours so good you won’t be able to stop!

Tahini

Tahini, or tahina (طحينة in Arabic), is a sesame seed paste with a rich, nutty flavor and a creamy texture.

It’s used as a condiment, usually mixed or diluted with other ingredients, in most countries in the Levant and Easter-Mediterranean regions and some North African countries.

To make the best tahini sauce, use tahini with a light beige, sandy color, and a smooth, pourable texture.

Avoid dark, pasty, and gritty tahini, as those are often bitter and not authentic.

When buying tahini, read the ingredients list. Good-quality tahini should be made with 100% hulled sesame seeds, and no other ingredients should appear on the label.

You can find high-quality tahini in ethnic food stores; Middle Eastern or Asian grocery stores are your best bet.

Some supermarkets also keep imported tahini from Eastern Mediterranean countries like Lebanon, Turkey, and Israel. Those are usually the best!

We tell you all this because we bought the “wrong” tahini for years. One that was pasty, dark, gritty, and bitter.

Learning what to look for when buying tahini was the biggest game-changer in our Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cooking.

We thought raw, unhulled, organic, and modern packaging were the things to look for. We were so wrong. Go for traditional if you can.

Suddenly, recipes like this easy tahini sauce, hummus, baba ghanoush, falafel, tahini salad, and anything tahini-drizzled made so much sense.

They went from bitter, gritty, and overpowering to silky smooth, lusciously rich, gracefully nutty, and I-want-to-eat-this-thing-with-a-spoon-like-Nutella feeling.

Lemon juice

We recommend freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Garlic

Garlic should be crushed, not grated or minced.

The garlic flavor in tahini sauce is mild, and the sauce should be smooth; that’s why crushed garlic is preferable to grated garlic.

The crushed clove infuses the tahini sauce with a mild garlic flavor without affecting its texture. If you grate the garlic in it, you will get a gritty tahini sauce, which is not ideal.

Salt

We recommend sea salt or kosher salt.

Water

Cold tap water is fine. Take our recipe as a starting point and add more or less water until you reach your desired consistency.

Generally, tahini sauce should be drizzled with a spoon, but you can make it thicker or thinner based on your preference.

Whisk for a minute or until the ingredients turn into a smooth and velvety sauce.

You’ll see the tahini change texture and go from thick to curdle to velvety smooth. The color will also change from beige to light beige.

Tip: The ingredients will curdle at first, and that’s normal. Keep whisking until smooth.

Then add peeled, crushed garlic, stir it in, and let it infuse for 5 to 10 minutes.

Taste and adjust the amount of lemon juice, salt, and water to suit your preferences.

Remember that the sauce thickens slightly as it sits, so if you make it ahead, you might need to stir in more water when you serve it.

Tahini sauce pairs well with most veggies, legumes, salads, and grains.

We make a fresh batch every week, as having it ready in the fridge is handy. Here are some of our favorite pairings:

Hummus

Did you know that you can drizzle hummus with tahini sauce? It’ll change your life!

Here’s the hummus recipe and the pita bread recipe to dip.

Falafel

Drizzle tahini sauce on freshly made falafel served on hummus and get transported to the Middle East.

This is one of the best flavor combinations; we are sure you’ll love it.

Here’s our easy falafel recipe.

Cauliflower

Cauliflower and tahini are simply delicious together. These are our favorite cauliflower recipes to serve with a generous drizzle of tahini sauce:

• Whole roasted cauliflower
• Roasted cauliflower florets
• Air fried cauliflower
• Roasted cauliflower salad

Like cauliflower, eggplant craves tahini sauce! Drizzle plenty of tahini sauce on:

• Stuffed eggplant with couscous salad
• Roasted eggplant boats
• Grilled eggplants
• Air fried eggplants

Roasted vegetables

Okay, maybe we have a tahini sauce obsession and need an intervention, but we honestly love drenching most roasted vegetables in it.

• Roasted carrots
• Roasted zucchini
• Roasted potatoes
• Mix roasted vegetables.
• Stuffed bell peppers
• Smashed potatoes

Bowls

• Mediterranean Bowl
• Couscous salad

It’s a healthy and tasty sauce that works well in sandwiches, too. It also goes well with most vegetables and spreads, so experiment with your favorite combinations.

Wraps

If you want to try it in a wrap, we recommend a tangy and refreshing shirazi salad over a bed of hummus and topped with mashed falafel and pickled onions or beets.

Drizzle plenty of the tahini sauce on top, and you are in for a treat!

Dip

You can also use it as a tasty and healthy dip to replace mayonnaise, queso, or sour cream.

It’s delicious with oven-roasted or air-fried potatoes and fantastic with raw veggie sticks.

Salads

• Piyaz or Turkish white bean salad
• Tahini salad
• Fattoush
• Farro salad
• Rice salad
• Cauliflower salad

Tip

If there’s one thing we’d like you to take away from this blog post is this:

“Source tahini made from hulled sesame seeds and light in colour, and typically made in the Levant region in countries such as Lebanon or Palestine. Avoid unhulled sesame pastes that are dark and gritty. We can’t stress enough how important it is to seek out authentic tahini. The key to creamy dreamy is in the tahini, really.”

Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad, Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love: Recipes to Unlock the Secrets of Your Pantry, Fridge, and Freezer: A Cookbook. Page 19.

Yogurt tahini sauce

Add a few tablespoons of Greek yogurt to tahini sauce to make a ravishing yogurt tahini sauce.

Here’s our recipe for yogurt tahini sauce.

Make ahead: Tahini sauce can be made up to four days ahead and keeps well in the fridge. After 24 hours, it starts to thicken, so you might have to add a dash of water to make it drizzleable again.

Refrigerator: Store in a sealed jar in the fridge for up to 5 days. Stir well before serving. After a few days, you might want to add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice or a dash of water to thin it up.

Freezer: To freeze tahini sauce, transfer it to ice cube trays and freeze it for up to 6 months. Thaw in the refrigerator overnight.

For more ideas, take a peek at our selection here:

• Vegan ranch dressing
• Chipotle sauce
• Vegan mayo
• Marinara sauce
• Tzatziki
• Cilantro lime dressing