TAHINI MADE IN YOUR KITCHEN

I love to have some baba ganouj in the refrigerator occasionally.

The eggplant part is easy. After piercing it in a few places to avoid exploding it in the oven, I roast it at 400 degrees until very soft inside—this take close to an hour. Then I cut the eggplant in half lengthwise, and scrape the soft flesh off the skin, dump it into the food processor with the rest of the ingredients.

The tahini part is more of a problem if you prefer making your own. Looking at recipes for home-made tahini, many suggest grinding the toasted sesame seeds with some sesame oil in the food processor—it didn’t work. From previous experience I’d learned that fine seeds like sesame and poppy seeds just whirl around by the blade but not ground. For my first attempt I used the tahini as is without fully grinding the seeds. The resulting baba ganouj didn’t quite have the correct texture but it was perfectly good.

The only way I know of grinding fine seeds at home is using a seed grinder. I do have a poppy seed grinder that also works for sesame seeds but it is a slow, slow process.

Can anyone offer another solution?