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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Lifestyle
Nicholas Jordan

Australian supermarket tahini taste test: one of the worst is ‘thick enough to build a sandcastle’

Taste tester Nicholas Jordan lying on the ground surrounded by bowls of tahini.
The best value tahini was ‘textbook’: ‘slightly sweet, bitter, wheaty, thick and sticky,’ wrote reviewers. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian

This morning I made myself a tahini latte. The morning before, I mixed tahini with yoghurt and powdered ginger and poured it over my muesli. I use tahini in salad dressings, in sauces for spicy noodles, I’ve even put it in pesto. But until a few weeks ago, I only had the most vague idea of which tahini I liked or not (I just knew to avoid any brands in the health aisle) and I suspect I’m not the only picnic-attending hummus-maker that needs an education.

I gathered 18 supermarket aisle tahinis and four reviewers (including Syrian Australian author and chef Sharon Salloum, and Tuli Keidar, a friend who came close to dedicating their life to hummus before joining the coffee industry) for a blind taste test. We tasted the tahini in two rounds, hulled first and unhulled second. Before presenting the reviewers with the tahini, we stirred each container to make sure the oil and paste had mixed together.

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