Monday, April 18, 2011

Sesame Simit

via Uniglobalexotic.wordpress.com
Growing up I knew three things about sesame : Sesame Street, Open Sesame, and a rhyme about a sesame seed bun. What else did I need to know? Right?

Ummm....Tahini?

Yeah...tahini is made from ground up sesames. It's very important to middle eastern cuisine. You can't make yummy halva (confection) or hummus (chick pea spread) without it. I dare you to eat a falafel sandwich without tahini sauce. (Lemon juice, salt, garlic, tahini = yum!) Actually, I put that sh...





Sorry, wrong commercial. :)

As I was saying, sesame is an ingredient in tons of things that I love. My two Turkish favorites are Tahin Pekmez (Turkish spread, sort of like peanut butter) and Simit (pic above). Simit and çay are standard fare for every Turk, from all walks of life.

What variety of sesame do you crave? And what does this have to do with writing?

Well, I was thinking about my first post. There are so many ways I could have gone with this blog, with my manuscript, and they all would have been fun. There was one message that I kept coming back to: Tales of Turkiye, from my American-bride perspective. And it all started from one small seed.

10 comments:

Avo said...

I love that stuff... I used it in fried tofu sandwiches and in wraps just last week.

Say, I find it marketed here as "Tahin", "Thina", "Tahineh", "Tahini", "Téhina", and "Tahiné"...

I suspect it's because they are imports from Greece, Turkey, and various middle-eastern countries... And possibly some are using the English spelling by default or others are using approximated French transliterations of middle eastern tongues.

Would you happen to know which is which?

In passing, you might be interested to know that there is a similar ingredient in Japanese cuisine called neri-goma. It doesn't quite taste the same but it's close. : j

Old Kitty said...

I love Tahini!!!!! With raspberry jam!!! Tahini on toast! Yum!!!
:-)

I put that *bleep* on everything! LOL! Take care
x

KatOwens: Insect Collector said...

Lovely- in Charleston we eat benne wafers (thin sesame cookies about half-dollar size).
When I was in college I worked at the bakery that makes them. Some days we would make hundreds of pounds of little cookies. It was awesome.

PT Dilloway said...

Hummus is good. I could eat buckets of that stuff.

PT Dilloway said...

I've used hummus with chicken nuggets instead of ranch or BBQ sauce--yummy. I also experimented with using it instead of pizza sauce. That was pretty good too.

Anonymous said...

Love tahini and hummus and that pic looks delish!!

Sarah said...

Love hummus, love tahini, and now am very hungry. Sigh.

Creepy Query Girl said...

awe, love the turn of phrase! I'm actually eating sesame seeds as we speak, roasted and on my sushi rolls! Yum!

Southpaw said...

That’s a great ingredient and it makes such tasty stuff too.

Deniz Bevan said...

You really really have me craving simit, beyaz peynir and cay right now. I can get the latter two but there's no simit to be found anywhere on this continent except in NYC...

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