"An invaluable cream to accompany grilled and baked vegetables, fish and meat. It melts softly when spooned on top, forming an effortless, impromptu sauce." Nigel Slater
This is not Nigel's sauce - I will come to that - but it's the closest I could find to the recipe in A Cook's Book - one of that set of little 'essentials' - the first recipes. This recipe is from a website called The Real Recipes which is written by a genial looking man called Adam. Adam calls his version Tahini Yoghurt sauce, which is a rather more accurate description than Nigel's A herb cream. because even NIgel's sauce does not have a huge number of herbs in it - he suggests 10 basil leaves and a handful of dill fronds and they are not mixed in - as here. Adam goes one step further however by swirling some spiced oil on top, although he does say that this is an optional extra. Better if you were using it as a dip I guess. I also remembered from somewhere in Ottolenghi's repertoire a green tahini sauce, and so I set out to explore.
But first let me go back a step. I knew that this particular sauce, would be the next topic for a post, but for some reason I remembered something even simpler than it is. What I remembered was Nigel saying that just adding a dash of cream to any juices you might have from whatever you had been cooking, and scraping and swirling them together as well as reducing them a little would make a wonderful sauce for your meat, fish, vegetables - whatever it was. So last night I cooked some salmon with some asparagus, lemon and fennel 'en papillote' - which is to say, wrapped in baking paper and cooked in the oven for a mere quarter of an hour. There were juices of course, and so I tipped them into a small pan, added a couple of spoonfuls of cream, swirled it all about until reduced a bit and poured over the salmon. Delicious.
Only, I had Nigel's creamy sauce all wrong. In fact the only 'correct' thing that I remembered was the word 'cream' which, in fact did not apply to actual cream in the Nigel context - more to the texture of the finished sauce. And since my exploration of tahini sauces I can tell you that the most common descriptive word is creamy.
So what is Nigel's actual recipe? Here it is - and as you can see the major ingredients are yoghurt and tahini - no cream:
"Put 200ml of thick yoghurt in a bowl, then stir in 4 tablespoons of tahini and a squeeze of lemon juice. (I like it especially with the burnt lemons above.)" - remember them? "I prefer to do this lightly, leaving ribbons of the sesame paste marbling the snow-white yoghurt. To this add shredded basil leaves (about 10 medium-sized), a handful of finely chopped dill fronds or a mixture of 12 finely chopped leaves of mint and 20 of coriander.
To use it as a dressing (shredded cabbage, crisp white or red, shaved fennel and sliced orange), whisk in a couple of tablespoons of iced water."
It's a peculiar mixture of absolutely precise - '20 coriander leaves' and very vague - 'a squeeze of lemon juice'. This photograph is the only one I could find of anything resembling swirls of tahini - and this is just demonstrating the mixing process. Everybody else completely combined the two. Nigel was also almost alone in not including lemon, garlic or oil in the sauce. It's a good basic template however I guess.
Enough of Nigel - who never seems to have mentioned this particular sauce again, even though he said it's an essential that he uses all the time. He does mention various tahini sauce kind of things as part of a recipe but they are never like the one in The Cook's Book.
Never mind. NIgel, of course, is not of Middle-eastern origin and so I turned to the Middle-Easterners - Ottolenghi and co; Greg Malouf and Claudia Roden to see what they had to say on the subject.
Of course when it comes to tahini there's a certain amount of food snobbery involved. The sesame seeds need to have come from Ethiopia apparently, and the tahini itself is better from places like Lebanon and Israel than Greece. Are those poor inhabitants of those central Middle-Eastern countries able to carry on producing it one wonders? Will the price of tahini soar as well? Here in outer suburban rather Anglo Eltham I can just source tahini that is 'made in Australia from imported products' on the supermarket shelves. I'm sure if I lived in the trendier suburbs of Melbourne there might be other options. I'm also sure that the jar of tahini that currently sits in my pantry is probably well past its best, so it's probably a good thing that my taste buds are not that discriminating. If yours are, then when buying you should:
"taste the tahini. It should be runny, smooth and delicious to eat by the spoonful just as it is or to drizzle on ice-cream, toast, porridge or roast vegetables. If it’s not creamy, rich and non-claggy straight from the jar, it’s not going to become any more creamy, rich and non-claggy once it’s added to a dish." Yotam Ottolenghi
Now how on earth are you going to taste the tahini before buying? The best you can do is not buy it again if it's awful.
I think it was Ottolenghi who said somewhere that tahini for the Middle-Easterners is a bit like HP sauce to the British, and in an introduction to his recipe for Tahini sauce he comments on how ubiquitous it was in Jerusalem, when he and Sami Tamimi were researching for their book of that name:
"it was served to us in its pure state, diluted, plain or seasoned; mixed with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil; combined with peppers or parsley; served as a salad dressing and as a condiment, a sweetened confection and even in a dessert."
Simple tahini sauce is just a mix of tahini, water, lemon, garlic and salt. And Tom Hunt will show you a way of making it with the remains of the tahini in its jar - Tahinia jar sauce or, of course there are lots and lots of recipes on the net and in your cookbooks at home. Just about everyone has a recipe for it.
Then there's the tahini yoghurt sauce, that Nigel was telling us about. Ottolenghi uses it here and there - as in this recipe for Loaded fries with tahini yoghurt and smokey-sweet nuts (almost a sort of Middle-Eastern version of poutine although much more tempting looking). His yoghurt version - here at least - includes the lemon and garlic that Nigel leaves out.
What about green tahini sauce? Well Ottolenghi has lots of dishes that feature a green tahini sauce, and he also has a recipe for Tahini parsley sauce (no picture) which is fundamentally the tahini sauce above but with parsley to make it green. Again no yoghurt, but I'm guessing there are yoghurt versions as well. This picture is the best I could find.
Tahini sauce is almost endlessly versatile as Ottolenghi advised to somebody asking about tasty sauces:
"Tahini sauce, green or otherwise, is one of my favourites. If I don’t have herbs at home, or if I just fancy a change, I’ll often mix in some miso or soy for a deep, savoury hit. Or, if I want some chilli heat, I’ll add chilli flakes, harissa or similar chilli pastes such as doubanjiang and gochujang; just remember to add plenty of lemon or lime juice to balance things out."
All of which is very inauthentic and would probably get some people rather upset. Greg Malouf - a Lebanese by birth also turns it into a mayonnaise and makes a very inauthentic Celeriac remoulade with tahini and golden raisin - alas no picture.
Tahini is ubiquitous these days. And we all love hummus. But not everybody loves tahini sauce. In his introduction to tahini sauce in Jerusalem, Ottolenghi had this to say:
"It is very hard to translate the local fascination with tahini to an outsider. When we filmed a documentary for the BBC in Jerusalem, we tried to get James and Lauren, the crew from England, to catch the tahini bug. We never managed, even when we sneaked it into their food behind thier backs. They both spotted it and thought it just spoilt everything, whether a juicy kebab or a fresh salad. They understood the idea behind mixing it into hummus, but not having it as the star ingredient in a sauce."
You have to try though don't you? But yes, just adding some cream to juices in a pan makes a faboulous sauce - or I suppose it could be wine too. I wonder whether it would work with tahini?
BACK THEN
November 1 - a new month. The Melbourne Cup looms.
2022 - Nothing
2018 - One last try at tomatoes
2016 - Chicken and champagne - it must have been Cup Day
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