Photo: a glimpse inside my freezer. Over the last two years of researching and developing our plant-based tahini ice cream, my freezer was filled with numerous formulations and flavor variations. During my childhood, I loved to drizzle tahini and date syrup over my ice cream or sprinkle it with halvah crumbs, a tahini-based Middle Eastern sweet. My mom would prepare a frozen dessert at home by mixing whipped cream, sugar, and tahini. She would pour this mixture into Tupperware's Jell-Ring...

Cultures across the Middle East have been using tahini in desserts for generations (think, halvah!) before US pastry chefs started to swirl it into brownies. Crafted from sesame seeds that are toasted and pressed into a creamy paste with a delicious nutty flavor, tahini perfectly pairs with various flavors, including chocolate! When I first started working on creating our tahini fudge formula, the decision to substitute dairy cream with tahini paste in the traditional fudge recipe wasn't...

Sesame seeds, the only ingredient in tahini, are among the first crops cultivated by humans, primarily for oil extraction in ancient times. The earliest written mention of sesame is found in a cuneiform document from c. 2400 BCE, which describes using the crop to produce oils and, interestingly, references mythological stories of the gods enjoying "sesame wine." Extracting oil from sesame is relatively simple compared to turning sesame seeds into a paste. This also explains why tahini was...