Login | Register

(with apologies to Fleischer Studios for ripping off even more material from Popeye)

I don't know when I stopped taking sesame seeds for granted, although it wasn't long ago.  I do know that for years I never paid them much attention: They were either a flavorless adjunct to hamburger buns, more amusing to sing about in the McDonalds Big Mac jingle than to actually eat.  They were a fixture in the free candies my mom's friend Mary, owner of the only health food store in town, would give me every time we came in to do a little shopping, little rectangles of sesame seed suspended in a hard sugar-and-honey-based candy.  I would break them with my teeth, I would suck the sugar off, but all I would taste was honey and sugar, no sesame at all.  Occasionally the seeds would cross the line from innocuous to offensive, like when I would buy a loaf of Italian bread flecked with unhulled sesame seeds that had gone rancid long before the dough had even been mixed, and those seeds would give the entire bread a weird, bitter, burnt taste. 

I knew, from reading, that sesame was one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world; that the word "sesame" was one of the few words to arrive to our modern language from ancient Egyptian, nearly unchanged ("sesamt"; that a theory existed that the reason "Open sesame!" was the magic key in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was because the flowers of the sesame plant burst open, shooting out their wealth of seeds.  I knew that sesame oil was a staple of Chinese and Japanese cuisine, among others, not only because the flavor of roasted sesame was prized by cooks, but also because the oil in the sesame seed is remarkably stable, longer-lasting and less prone to rancidity than that of other oils, and that sesame's comparatively low oil yield was more than compensated for by this stability.I knew that sesame had grown in Africa for millennia, and had been brought to the Americas by Africans captured by slave traders, and that to this day sesame is still known in parts of the South by its African name, benne, and that the lacy, sesame-based cookies known as benne wafers are adored by many.  I had heard all of this, and I wondered what the fuss was all about -- or would have, if I had given sesame much of a second thought.

I think about all of this now, as I sit ten feet from a kitchen with a one-quart mason jar full of hulled sesame seeds, a 2-liter tin of Japanese sesame oil, a tiny jar of Chinese roasted sesame paste and an enormous jar of tahini, and once again I wince at my blinkered, parochial old self.  Sesame is an object lesson in a tiny little seed:  it is only as good to you as you are to it.  Overroast it, burn it, test its patience and let it grow stale before you use it, and it will offer you only bitterness.  But play with its texture a little bit, grind it coarsely, grind it smoothly, roast it with care and attention, and it will reward you with a taste both subtle and powerful, exotic and familiar.  You can make it savory with garlic and chilies and peanuts or cashews; you can make it sweet with sugar, honey, maple syrup or molasses.  Either way, it will play nicely.  One of my favorite little food science moments comes in the making of the world's easiest salad dressing:  take some tahini (measurements are sketchy here, but if you make this enough, you'll learn, quickly, when you have enough of everything), stir it a bit, squeeze in the juice of a lemon half or two, and stir.  The tahini will tighten up, become stiff and difficult to stir.  Then add a little water; not only will the tahini and lemon slacken, but the whole mix turns a creamy shade of white.  The first time I tried this, I couldn't believe that something so easy could be so cool.  I never get tired of watching it. 

I love to make this dressing, as well as the spice paste for my favorite hummus, the recipe found in Sally Schneider's A New Way to Cook:  you make a paste out of roasted ground cumin seeds, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, some minced garlic, a dash (or two) of cayenne pepper, salt, lemon juice and water.  Once it's all mixed, toss your chickpeas into a food processor or blender (Ms. Schneider recommends that you soak and cook your own chickpeas, and while the taste is much finer if you do this, I have also used canned chickpeas for this, and all was well), pulse to break up the beans a bit, add the paste in tablespoons, pulse some more, then let the motor run continuously and drizzle some more water in until you have something with the consistency of fluffy mashed potatoes and the taste of the zippiest, happiest bean dip you have ever tasted.  You can spread this on flatbread and drizzle some olive oil over it, or you can leave the olive oil off, and it will still be a joy to eat.  It is particularly good as a dip for steamed vegetables; it has a real affinity for greens, and it will fill you up.

Another sesame dressing that I love is another gem from Sally Schneider:  a dressing made of ground roasted sesame seeds, rice vinegar, a small hot chile (or you can use chile-infused vinegar), a little sesame oil, a little water and plenty of ginger.  Ms. Schneider recommends it as a sauce for meat, or as a salad dressing, but I like to use it on soba noodles, when I am craving Chinese sesame noodles but need to scale back on my intake of peanut-butter-based sauces.  While I am loath to create any more diet-based nonsense -- heaven knows, there's plenty of this out there -- I'm sure it's not just a coincidence that as soon as I stepped up my consumption of sesame, I lost a little weight.  I was eating less, I was happier with what I was eating, and I had more energy to haul my sorry self to the gym.  Even halvah made a difference.  No, I certainly am not arguing that halvah is a diet food:  I don't know what its calorie, fat gram or carb count is, and I really don't want to know.  I do know this:  it's intensely sweet and rich, it tastes like a million bucks, and it doesn't take much to make you go from satisfied and happy to sick and overstuffed.  I have been known to binge on ice cream, chocolate, candy corn and even those hot Indonesian ginger chews that are sold at my corner market.  I have never, ever, ever binged on halvah.  It is too rich, sweet and dreamy to invite absentminded consumption.

By now you may be thinking that I'm making much ado about nothing.  Years ago, I would have thought the same thing.  But you don't have to be fixated and vaguely berserk like me to find what a nice enhancement sesame can be to your diet.  There are three little things you can do to unlock the pleasures of sesame, and add a little zing to your food as well.  You can try the science experiment I mentioned above, tahini, lemons, water and salt.  You can add a little pepper, or garlic or ground cumin, but sometimes it's nice just to stick with the basic dressing, to remind yourself of just what a flavor powerhouse sesame is.  You can roast some sesame seeds in a dry cast-iron or nonstick skillet: put the pan over gentle heat, add the seeds, stir constantly -- if you don't keep them moving, some of the seeds will burn before the others begin to toast.  As you stir, watch the seeds get shiny as they gently exude their oils; they will clump together; keep stirring; eventually they will be at the perfect shade and the perfect fragrance for you, at which point you decant them immediately from the pan and shake them over your broccoli or your spinach or your salad or your poached chicken breast, or anything that you think could benefit from a little crunch and savor.  And when you are done, you can make easiest dessert I know how to make, short of polishing an apple or peeling an orange:  you can make sesame ice cream, which I found in Kevin Gould's brilliant book Loving and Cooking with Reckless Abandon (currently only available in the UK, but worth the price to get it shipped stateside).  Kevin Gould got this recipe from his friend Machiko Jinto, who uses Japanese black sesame paste, and someday I will snag some of this black sesame paste for myself, but in the meantime, I make it with tahini.  Once again, my pal sesame leaves me amazed:  this ice cream is so easy to make, and it tastes so wonderful that it almost hurts.

Sesame ice cream

1 pint of the best vanilla ice cream you can get

2 tablespoons tahini or black sesame paste

Let ice cream rest at room temperature until soft but not melted.  Spoon ice cream into mixer bowl.  Add tahini and mix (with the paddle if you have a stand mixer, with your regular beaters if you have a handheld mixer, with a wooden spoon if you have elbow grease).  When tahini is mixed in, pack ice cream back into container and return to freezer.   When you are ready to serve it forth, serve it forth.  Kevin Gould recommends that you "[t]hank Machiko for so simply delicious a dessert."  I agree.  Thank you, Machiko, for so simply delicious a dessert.

Dear friends, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is just laziness on my part, but this time around I have better reasons for returning to the archive.  I received a nice comment last week from Bruce W. Marcus about his friendship with the sui generis Alexander King, and I thought that now would be a good time to revisit the Alexander King post, which originally ran in a slightly longer form on January 26, 2004.  (Mr. Marcus's comment can be found here; it is a delightful story, and I thank him for sharing it with us.)

When I was on my sabbatical the week before last, feeling lonely, fractious and bumpy, the fabulous, sexy and not-at-all-evil Walt rode to my rescue by mailing me a pair of books that he knew would cheer me up. Indeed they did. (Walt is a genius at knowing when I'm down and in need of old Hollywood gossip and trivia: last summer he mailed me a copy of Louella Parsons' Tell it to Louella, which I received on August 14, the day of the blackout.)

One of them is Otto Friedrich's City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's. I haven't started it yet because I picked up the other one first, but Walt says that there are good stories abounding in it, including some about Charles Laughton massaging his own genitals with stage fright. Friends, I don't ask more from my Hollywood trivia than that. The other one, the one I am deep into now, is Alexander King's May This House Be Safe From Tigers. I don't know how I got this far in life without hearing of Alexander King (although the fact that both of his books are out of print; Tigers was published in 1961), but now that I've got him, I'm never letting him go. I asked Walt if Alexander King was famous for anything besides being a "poet, painter, cartoonist, raconteur and frequent guest on the Jack Paar show." He has graciously given me permission to quote from his letter:

Alexander King is one of the stars of an unwritten book about the celebrities who rotated in and out of the Addiction Research Center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. They specialized in morphine and heroin and would take anybody, but there was a regular bus from NYC. If I remember right, Chet Baker for sure, Sonny Rollins, God knows who else, were his classmates. Wm Burroughs [Jr] wrote 'Kentucky Ham' about it. They used to dole out free drugs in exchange for permission to experiment on 'em. To top that, they were experimented on by Dr. Harris Isbell, who was on the CIA payroll, and gave some of these poor guys LSD for 75 consecutive days.

He includes this informative, scary link.

But back to King. There are great, great stories in here, including a chapter on his trip down to Lexington, a polemic on the corrosive effect of advertising on the content of television shows, and some truly funny and inspired cartoons/slice of life vignettes. (A caveat: one thing that is less than great in here is King's condescending and dismissive attitude toward gay people. It is not atypical of the prevailing mores of the day; in fact, it is probably much more tolerant than most of the prevailing mores of the day, but I'm still sorry to see it. I would like to think that if King had been born 30 years later, his attitude would have been different -- but then again, if he had been born 30 years later, he would not be nearly the character that he was, shaped as he was by his time and place.)

There is not a single page that is not full of sublime, silly, profane, obscene, outraged, giddy language, and I'm afraid that given half the chance, I would quote the whole book right here. So instead I will try my damndest to not do so, and to leave you with this excerpt, which functions as an introduction to a tale of Alexander King watching a pair of seasoned, work-proud garbagemen and the sugarfoot trainee assigned to work with them:

These days I no longer keep any animals around the house, but once, quite a while ago, I was for some reason or another pretty deeply involved in raising hundreds and hundreds of tropical fish, andImust say I derived a great deal of fun and even satisfaction out of this expensive pastime.

But I finally had to give it all up, because early one morning, while I was watching the stupendous accouchement of an overgravid fundulus gularis, a shattering flash of illumination came upon me. To tell you the truth, the effects of that bitter moment of enlightenment have never completely faded from my mind Even now I sometimes still find myself under the unhappy spell of it, although it all happened more than thirty years ago...

You must understand that it's not that I'm afraid of being tempted back into my costly hobby again. No, no! Not a bit of it. Quite the contrary. It's only that I can no longer bear to look at all those dopey fish opening and closing their goddamned mouths a million times a day. It just gets me down. It gets me down because I know that those poor bastards aren't simply breathing or gasping for air. I know for a fact that they're all really screaming - screaming - like crazy. Yes, screaming and giving off heartbreaking, soul-shattering submarine howls. And, do you know what it is that they're all shouting?

They're shouting, "Look at Me! Please Look at Me! I'm so Original! I'm so Darling! I'm so Cute! Just Look at Me! and see how Unique I am! Look at me and Love me! Love me! Love me! Why don't you Love me? Please! Please! Love me! Love me! Love me!"

That's what these poor suckers are all saying. It's awful!

And what makes it so terrible for me is that I know only too goddamned well that that's exactly what everybody else is constantly saying too. I just don't care to have a swampful of pop-eyed, screaming fish go on reminding me of it all the time.

Yes, I guess the pride in one's own uniqueness is what keeps everybody going in this erratically operated sausage machine. I suppose that's why a lot of people go off their rockers nowadays, because pride in one's work, for instance, is certainly disappearing out of our world. It's impossible to be proud of the crappy things that most people have to do to earn their living - and believe me, I don't mean that any sort of real labor is ever debasing in itself. Just look at all our millionaires happily pfooshing around in their hobby shops, getting sawdust on their eyelashes and covering themselves with all sorts of decorative calluses which they can proudly show off at their clubs later on.

But what can be utterly debasing to the human spirit is if you have to earn your keep by performing some monotonous, mechanical gesture of such minute insignificance that even the smallest sense of achievement is totally absent from your endeavors.

Remember in my time I have known whimsical hod carriers, dignified sewer inspectors and even poetic chimney sweeps. Hey! I knew chimney sweeps...

In exactly four weeks from tonight, Lloyd and I will be here.  Until then, we will be lying back and dreaming. 

We're starting simply tonight, intrepid breadheads:  one white starter recipe, one rye starter recipe, from nothing but flour and water to (hopefully) a happy, bubbling culture six days later.  We will build starters, we might have a little discussion about baker's percentage's, but that's it for now.  This is mostly due to my desire not to bludgeon you over the head with too much information, too soon, but also due to the inevitable and sad aftereffects of insomnia on my little mind.  (Apparently at one point at the office today, I sat with my mouth hanging open for a good three minutes, until I caught my reflection in my computer monitor.  If a picture had been taken of me up to that moment, and if you had been asked to write a caption for that picture, I'm betting that seven out of ten of you would have written "Braiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiins..."

But back to the topic at hand.  For ease of explanation, I'll explain what I did, i.e. how I built my starters (scaling down a bit, of course, because I built my starters at Chef Jeffrey Hamelman's Advanced Bread Baking class at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center, where we were working with much larger quantities of dough), but I hasten to reiterate that these starters are not the be-all and end-all of starters.  There are dozens, if not hundreds, of terrific books on bread baking that can point you toward something that you can use with ease.  I will be glad to share a list of those terrific books, but for now, leave us roll up our sleeves and get to work.

White Sourdough Starter (a/k/a chef)

Day one:  In a bowl, crock or plastic container, combine 250 grams whole rye (or pumpernickel) flour, 312 grams warm water (about 85-90F) and 5g honey (the honey is optional, but it will assist in the fermentation process). Mix well, cover and leave for 24 hours.

Day two:  Measure 285 grams of the day one mix; discard the rest of the mix and return the scaled mix to the bowl.  Add 67.5 grams whole rye flour, 57.5 grams all-purpose flour and 155 grams warm (90F) water.  Mix well, cover and leave to ferment.  Do this twice on Day Two, about 12 hours apart.

Day three through five:  Measure 282.5 grams of the starter mix; discard the rest.  To the reserved starter add 125 grams all-purpose flour and 156 grams 85F-degree water.  Feed the starter in these proportions twice a day.  By day six you should have an active culture, ready for raising bread, but Chef Hamelman advises that if you can keep feeding it for two or three more days, you will have a stronger and more complexly-flavored starter.

Rye Sourdough Starter (a/k/a rye chef)

Day one:  Combine 227 grams whole rye (or pumpernickel) flour and 227 grams warm water (90F).  Mix, cover and let ferment for 24 hours.

Day two and three:  Measure 125 grams of mix; discard the rest.  Add 125 grams of whole rye flour and 125 grams of warm water.  Mix, cover and let ferment.  Feed this starter once a day for these two days, unless it becomes so vigorous so quickly that you think it can support a second feeding (unlikely at this stage, but possible).

Day four and five: Feed the starter in the same proportions you used in days two and three, only this time give the starter two daily feedings, not just one.  Like the white chef, the rye chef should be ready for baking by Day Six, but if you can hold off for a couple more days, the resultant starter will be stronger and better flavored.

More will follow, dear friends, when I am not quite so brainfully challenged.  (Braiiiiiiiiiins...)