Tahini Sauce - Maureen Abood (2024)

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Tahini sauce is an essential sauce in Lebanese and Middle Eastern cooking. My easy Lebanese tahini sauce recipe with lemon juice, garlic, salt and a secret ingredient found in every kitchen will make a smooth, luscious sauce every time. Looking for the best tahini? Find a great Lebanese Tahini in my shop.

Lebanese tahini sauce is one of the best flavor makers in our kitchen.This sauce is lemony, garlicky, smooth and luscious. I like to keep tahini sauce on hand at all times for an easy way to ramp up flavor. Finish dishes like my falafel recipe, homemade beef shawarma, Lebanese grilled kafta with tahini sauce goodness. I can’t imagine eating a shawarma wrap without it! Yotam Ottolenghi makes a phenomenal roasted cauliflower with sauce that is on my hit list, such a favorite Middle Eastern recipe.

Follow my guide for the right ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and a couple of simple tricks to make authentic tahini sauce just the way we like it: glossy, smooth, and delicious.

What is tahini sauce?

Tahini alone, as an ingredient, adds complexity and flavor to Lebanese dips likemy Best Homemade Hummus recipe and Lebanese Baba Ganoush.

The sauce is a combination of a few basic ingredients to make a smooth, flavorful sauce. The consistency is like salad dressing, or slightly thicker, to pour, drizzle, or dip.

Ingredients to make authentic tahini sauce

This requires just a few basic ingredients, which means they all should be excellent:

Tahini

Lemon Juice. Fresh is best! Vary this with fresh lime juice.

Garlic. Use a fresh garlic clove for great garlic flavor, or granulated garlic powder.

Salt

Ice Cold Water

How to make tahini sauce

Step 1. Mix the lemon juice with minced garlic. Allow this to “steep” and marinate for about 10 minutes. Strain the lemon juice and discard the garlic. We do this to soften the zest of the garlic and to make it as smooth as could be.

Step 2. Whisk or use a food processor to mix the garlicky lemon juice, tahini and salt. Watch now what happens—the mixture seizes and gets very lumpy.

Step 3. Cure the lumpiness! The fix here could not be easier: simply add ice cold water and whisk or process until you get a smooth, creamy sauce. Add more water, if needed, to get you there.

Tahini sauce recipe tips

Tahini seizes when mixed with liquids such as must-have fresh lemon juice. In cooking, seizing means the smooth liquid (tahini, or melted chocolate) gets stiff and clumpy.

Knowing that tahini seizes, and how to fix it, is the key to how to make a great sauce with the desired consistency: smooth!Fix the seized mixture with the addition of ice cold water.

​You may only need a little water to smooth out the mixture; it’s best to start with less water and add more as needed.

Pay attention to your garlic.To soften the flavor of the garlic and to make an ultra-smooth tahini sauce, use minced garlic to flavor the lemon juice, then discard (or use elsewhere). Another option is to simply use granulated garlic powder instead of fresh garlic in your sauce. Certainly you can stir the garlic right into the sauce and flavor will be delicious even though the sauce won’t be entirely smooth.

Take it slowly.Add the cold water a little bit at a time, taking care that it is not too thin or too thick. Look for the consistency of salad dressing, or slightly thicker.

How do you use tahini sauce?

The sauce is not the same as straight tahini. It is a combination of a few basic ingredients to make a smooth, flavorful sauce. The consistency is like salad dressing, or slightly thicker, to pour, drizzle, or dip. Use tahini sauce for shawarma (all stuffed in pita bread…delicious), and to dip falafel or veggies, or as a dressing for salads.

Storage

Store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator. It lasts for at least a week and usually much longer than that. Bring to room temperature and give it a whisk before serving.
Store your jar of tahini in the pantry, the same way you store peanut butter.

What is the best brand of tahini?

To find the best tahini, it’s a tasting game. And a stirring game. Tahini, which is simply pureed sesame seeds, likes to separate oil from solids. Those solids can become sludgy in the base of the jar, making the rest of the tahini oily, thin, not so good.

I have tasted more tahini than I can count in search of the very best in class. Look for little to no solids at the bottom of the jar, a creamy look and mouthfeel (!), and pleasant bitterness–which means not much bitterness.

I may be biased, but the reality is that the Lebanese tahini brands are my favorite tahini brands.

The best tahini has little to no separation of ground sesame and oil. It is less bitter, smooth, and stirs easily.

If you have not liked tahini when you’ve tasted it, that’s likely because the brand you’ve had is too bitter. Bitter is not a given; many tahinis are creamy and nearly “sweet.”

Best tahini brands: Lebanon Valley Tahini, Al Kanator, Cedars, and Soom.

Frequently Asked Questions

Recipes with Tahini Sauce

Garlic Tahini Eggplant

Fried Kibbeh Bites with Tahini Dipping Sauce

Lebanese Spicy Fish with Tahini and Pine Nuts

Roasted Butternut Squash with Tahini and Pine Nuts

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