In addition to the Fried Peanuts, I also made the Homemade Sesame Paste recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook yesterday. Kenji writes that the difference between Chinese sesame paste and tahini is that the Chinese sesame paste uses roasted sesames.

The process of making Homemade Sesame Paste is easy enough to understand: toast sesame seeds until golden brown and then either process in a food processor with roasted sesame oil or grind in a mortar and pestle with roasted sesame oil.

In practice, it is a little more difficult. The sesame seeds needed attention while toasting to ensure none burned. I tried the mortar and pestle first, and I could tell it was going to take a while, so I shifted to my food processor, which is a tiny tiny version of a food processor. This went a bit quicker. I ended up using about 5 tablespoons of oil by the end of it (Kenji notes that “with some sesame seeds, you may need additional sesame oil to get to the right consistency”).

It tasted fine, but I’m not sure I can really tell the difference from tahini. I’m not confident I got it to a “smooth” consistency, the texture in the mouth is still a bit grainy, but visually it looks ok.

I can’t imagine a situation where I’ll make this again. Kenji says that this paste is available at any decent Asian supermarket, so surely I’ll be able to find it. If not, he offers alternatives of mixing peanut butter with sesame oil or frying tahini paste. We almost always have tahini in the fridge, so frying some of that seems like a much easier last resort to not finding it at the store.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.