This delicious dairy-free tahini sauce is super creamy yet light and airy. Use the tangy tahini sauce for falafels, serve it with roasted veggies or include it as a Middle Eastern-style dip in a mezze spread.
Servings16
Ingredients
- 3 garlic cloves, peeled and grated*
- ½ cup fresh lemon juice, from about 3 lemons
- 1 cup tahini paste
- ½ cup cold water, more as needed
- ½ teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste
Instructions
- Place the grated garlic and lemon juice in a large mixing bowl. Let the garlic sit in the acidic lemon juice for 10 minutes to mellow. Don’t skip this resting time, or your lemon tahini sauce will be too pungent.
- Add the tahini paste and use a fork to mix it with the lemon juice. The mixture will seize up and turn thick and grainy.
- Next, add the water, two tablespoons at a time, stirring with the fork between each addition. Once the sauce loosens, swap the fork for a whisk and keep adding water a little bit at a time. The sauce will turn smooth and creamy.
- Add more water, one tablespoon at a time, if the sauce is too thick.
- Whisk in the ground cumin. Taste and season with salt – I add a teaspoon of sea salt but you may need less depending on the type of salt.
Notes
- For a smooth sauce, grated garlic works best – I use a Microplane. But you can finely mince the garlic if you’re not in the mood for grating garlic. Alternatively, you can blitz the peeled garlic cloves and lemon juice in a blender for an ultra-smooth tahini sauce.
- This recipe is a simplified version of Michael Solomonov’s tahini sauce. For his creamy tahini sauce method: Use a blender to pulse a whole head of unpeeled garlic cloves with ⅔ cup of lemon juice. Allow the pulp to sit for 10 minutes. Then push the pulp through a fine mesh strainer, discarding the remaining garlic pieces. Continue with the recipe in step 2.