Baking with Tahini
Leave the grain flour to a conventional bread, and use tahini to bake a nice loaf of seed bread.
How is it possible?
If you have ever tried to make tahini sauce, you would know that when you add some water to the quite liquid raw tahini and stir it, it turns into a kind of stiff, doughy lump of mud, that resembles a dough. In fact, if you would add an egg and leavening agent (baking powder or baking soda) to this mud substance, you can bake a nice loaf of bread. Tahini is much closer to flour than it seems!
When you take starchy seeds (such as sesame - tahini's single ingredient) and grind them until fine, it results in a powder, or a type of flour. Sesame flour, in our case. The sesame seeds "flour grains" float comfortably in huge amounts of sesame oil (the raw tahini usually contains a little more than 50% oil), but inside it hides a considerable amount of solid powder (usually a little less than 50%). Even though the oil is liquid, it does not wet the grains. On the contrary, it wraps and surrounds them from all sides and keeps them dry from the moisture in the air.
And that is exactly why this phenomenon seems so miraculous. We think that if the tahini is liquid it means it is wet, but reality tells a completely different story. Only when you mix water into the raw tahini does the sesame flour finally get wet. Then what happens to any flour happens to it - the small grains swell and become sticky, which causes them to stick to each other in water and become dough.
The dough sits in a puddle of oil, but it is still doughy, stiff and uncomfortable to mix. At least until you add enough liquid to squeeze between the grains, separate them and create the beloved creamy texture of the classic tahini sauce. Add Salt, lemon, garlic, parsley, now you know how it happened.
Translated and edited from Hebrew Article wrote by Blidad Hashuchi on Calcalist
(בלדד השוחי, כלכליסט)
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