Chocolate Tahini, Hello, You Want This
It’s important in the life of a snacker to have a collection of condiments and spreads so vast you’ll never get bored. Or this is what I tell myself when I go hunting in the pantry for my precious chocolate tahini. That’s right. Chocolate tahini. Not black tahini—which we also love. Everybody’s favorite sesame paste now comes in sweet chocolate flavor and there is nothing not to love about this fact.
This brilliant product has the smooth, spreadable texture of regular tahini, but a rich, chocolaty flavor that I have to admit—tastes like frosting. The jar beside my keyboard as we speak is Sesame King, ($10 on Amazon, though you might be able to find it cheaper at your local grocery store) which comes in this wonderfully normal white plastic jar with a close-up of a sensual strawberry in a tahini bath. High in fiber! It whispers atop the label. Vegan! Peanut free! 100% Pure! Non-GMO! I almost forgot one: Gluten-free! There’s a lot going on here. But this is a chocolate spread, people, made with powdered sugar. If you want health food, try the produce aisle.
At first, I treated it like Nutella, spreading it on crusty toasted bread, and dipping apples in it because apparently I’m an 8-year old watching Kim Possible after school. Then I graduated to eating it straight from the plastic jar in moments of need. But there’s so much more you can do.
tahini-hot-chocolate
Actual cooking-wise, you can have a lot of fun playing with it in all of your favorite tahini desserts. I make tahini hot chocolate with it (have you ever had this? You need to have this), dollop it into this wildly good sesame banana bread batter, or make chocolate tahini cookies. Note that because the chocolate tahini has added sugar in it, when you substitute it for regular tahini in any recipe, you’ll want to decrease the amount of sugar elsewhere to balance the sweetness. For example, when I made these tahini cookies with the chocolate tahini, I decreased the sugar from ¾ cup to ¼.
So look into your crowded pantry—is that a tiny void between the buckwheat flour and dried persimmon? I know just the thing that can fit in there.
