Tahini Sauce With Garlic and Lemon Recipe (2024)

Middle Eastern

A flavorful, garlicky sauce tempered by lemon juice.

J. Kenji López-Alt

Culinary Consultant

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

Learn about Serious Eats'Editorial Process

and

Lindsay Anderson

Why It Works

Blending whole garlic cloves in lemon juice prevents harsher garlic flavors from forming, leaving the sauce aromatic instead of pungent.
Whisking together the tahini and water slowly and thoroughly makes a light, smooth sauce.

Tahini is one of the most recognizable staples of Middle Eastern cuisine, a wonderfully nutty paste created by grinding sesame seeds. And it has a long history: According to Jewish cookbook author Adeena Sussman, tahini was first cited as a culinary ingredient in the 13th-century Iraqi cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, and over the centuries has become widely-used throughout the Levant, Turkey, Middle East, and beyond. That said, its precise origins are about as easy to pin down as those of hummus, the dip in which ground sesame seeds play an important supporting role.

Tahini is also extremely popular as a sauce all its own. In Israel, it’s commonly mixed with water, lemon juice, salt, and often garlic before being drizzled over everything from falafel and sabich to roasted vegetables, meatballs, and anything else that benefits from its savory (and mildly bitter) touch.

Perhaps you’ve been making tahini sauce for years, however, and now you’re thinking, “It’s a pretty simple concept, what new technique could the acclaimed chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author Michael Solomonov possibly teach me about something that requires just a few simple ingredients? And while I’m thinking about it, do any of his friends call him Mike Solo?”

We don’t know the answer to the second question, but we can address the first: Yes, the acclaimed chef Michael Solomonov does have a revelatory technique for making tahini sauce that’s likely new to you, and it produces a condiment that’s airy in texture and richly garlicky in flavor without being overpowering. The trick? Blending lemon juice with an entire head of garlic cloves—peels and all—until a pulpy mash is formed; it’s then pushed through a sieve into a large bowl before the rest of the ingredients are whisked in.

During this blending and straining process, the lemon juice works furiously to denature the allinase, a compound in garlic that, when cloves are cut or smashed, reacts with another compound called allicin to create the raw garlic flavor we all know and love (or hate, depending on the context). This aggressive tempering of the garlic is how you can get away with using 20 cloves of garlic in proportion to just one cup of tahini, some cold water, cumin, and salt.

Does this tahini sauce take slightly more effort than the standard one? It is. But we can confidently say Mike Solo’s method is absolutely worth it.

March 2016

This recipe was adapted from Michael Solomonov's cookbook Zahev by J. Kenji López-Alt, while the recipe's headnote was written by Lindsay Anderson.

Recipe Details

Tahini Sauce With Garlic and Lemon

Prep10 mins

Active5 mins

Total10 mins

Serves16 servings

Makes2 cups

Ingredients

1 whole head garlic, broken into individual unpeeled cloves (about 20 cloves)
2/3 cup fresh juice from 3 to 4 lemons (160ml)
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin (2g)
1 generous cup tahini paste (about 10 ounces; 300g by weight)
Cold water
Kosher salt

Directions

Combine garlic and lemon juice in a blender. Pulse until a pulpy puree is formed, about 15 short pulses. Transfer to a fine mesh strainer set over a large bowl. Press out as much liquid as you can with the back of a spoon or a rubber spatula, then discard solids.
Add cumin and tahini paste to lemon/garlic juice and whisk to combine. The mixture will seize up and turn pasty. Add water a few tablespoons at a time, whisking in between each addition, until a smooth, light sauce is formed. The tahini sauce should very slowly lose its shape if you let ribbons of it drop from the whisk into the bowl. Season to taste with salt. Refrigerate for up to 1 1/2 weeks.

Special Equipment

Blender

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
119	Calories
10g	Fat
6g	Carbs
4g	Protein

Show Full Nutrition Label

Nutrition Facts
Servings: 16
Amount per serving
Calories	119
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 10g	13%
Saturated Fat 1g	7%
Cholesterol 0mg	0%
Sodium 47mg	2%
Total Carbohydrate 6g	2%
Dietary Fiber 1g	4%
Total Sugars 0g
Protein 4g
Vitamin C 6mg	30%
Calcium 35mg	3%
Iron 1mg	5%
Potassium 113mg	2%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)