Sesame seed

• tila

  Sanskrit

• til

  Nepali

• wijen

  Javanese

• bijan

  Malay

• nga

  Thai

• vừng

  Vietnamese

• ufuta

  Swahili

Nutty and rich, from a seed that is 45–50 per cent fat and 20–25 per cent protein. The handbooks add a slight bitterness, which they attribute to the phytic and oxalic acids of the seed combining with calcium.

Quiet when raw and made by heat. Oil pressed from raw seed was described by a trained panel as raw sesame, earthy and green, and held only five aroma-active compounds. Oil from roasted seed held seventy or more, and the panel’s words became roasted sesame, nutty and caramel-like, turning to burnt and smoky as roasting went further. These are measurements on oil pressed from the seed and not on the seed in a pan.

White, ivory, grey, beige, brown, red or black, according to the cultivar. The seed is a flattened oval 2–3 mm long, narrowly ridged around its edge.

A crisp, thin seed that crushes to an oily meal and, ground further, to a smooth paste. Hulled seed is softer and paler than seed with its coat on.

• Linoleic acid — With oleic acid, the bulk of the oil that makes up 45–50 per cent of the seed: 38–49 per cent of sesame oil is linoleic acid and 36–54 per cent oleic.(what linoleic acid is)
• 2,5-Dimethylpyrazine — One of the pyrazines, roasted and nutty in smell, found in oil pressed from roasted seed and absent from oil pressed from raw seed.(what 2,5-dimethylpyrazine is)
• Sesamin and sesamolin — Lignans of the oil, at 0.1–0.6 and 0.25–0.3 per cent of it. With sesamol, which forms from them on roasting, they are what the handbooks credit for the oil’s resistance to oxidation.

Toast it. Raw sesame is mild, and its roasted, nutty smell is made by heat: a dry pan over moderate heat, the seed kept moving, and out of the pan as soon as it colours, because it goes from golden to burnt and bitter quickly. Leave it whole to scatter, or crush it lightly so the oil comes to the surface.

Eaten raw or roasted. The seed is sprinkled on cakes, rolls and biscuits before baking, crushed into tahini, mixed with sugar and flour as halva, added toasted to soups, and set in caramelised sugar as a sweet. As a seasoning it is the seed of za’atar, dukkah, gomasio, furikake, shichimi togarashi, everything bagel seasoning and goda masala.

• toasting — The change the seed depends on. A study pressed oil from seed roasted in hot air (200 °C, 20 minutes) or by microwave: either way the oil held pyrazines, pyrroles, furans and sulphur compounds that the oil of raw seed did not, and a panel’s raw, earthy and green notes gave way to roasted sesame, nutty and caramel-like ones. The longest microwave roasting left mainly burnt and smoky notes and a bitter taste, the wanted ones having fallen away.
• grinding — Crushed, the seed becomes a paste: the handbooks record it ground into tahini throughout the Arab world, and mixed with sugar and flour as halva.
• baking — Seeds are often sprinkled on cakes, rolls and biscuits before baking, where they roast on the surface in the oven.

Taste a pinch. Sound seed is mild and faintly sweet; seed whose oil has turned tastes bitter and stale, and toasting will not put that right.

• A bitter or stale taste when a pinch is chewed
• A stale, oily smell from the jar
• Clumping or dampness

• Rancidity of the seed oil, which the handbooks associate with damaged or contaminated seed more than with sound seed
• Moisture uptake above the 8 per cent at which dry seed keeps

Pedaliaceae

An erect, stout annual herb, 0.5–2 m tall, with a square, ribbed stem and a taproot reaching 90 cm. The lower leaves are opposite and broad, the upper ones narrow or three-lobed. Bell-shaped flowers 2–3.5 cm long, white to violet, sit in the upper leaf axils; they open in the early morning and are shed the same afternoon. The fruit is an oblong, four-angled capsule 1.5–3 cm long holding many seeds, and in most cultivars it splits when dry and sheds them. The seeds are flattened, 2–3 mm long and up to a millimetre thick.

• India — major producer. The second producer in 2002–2005, at about 650,000 t a year, and the place of domestication in the later of the two handbook accounts.
• China — major producer. The largest producer in 2002–2005, at about 730,000 t a year.
• Myanmar — major producer. About 500,000 t a year in 2002–2005.
• Sudan — major producer. About 260,000 t a year in 2002–2005, and with India the largest exporter in 2000–2003.
• Uganda — notable producer. About 110,000 t a year in 2002–2005.
• Ethiopia — notable producer. About 50,000 t a year in 2002–2005, and rising strongly when the handbook was written.

Harvested 75–150 days after sowing, most commonly at 100–110, when leaves and stems turn from green to yellow. The capsules ripen from the bottom of the plant upwards and split when dry, so the crop is cut before all of them are mature: losses from shattering in the field can reach 75 per cent, and even non-shattering types may lose 25 per cent. Smallholder crops are cut by hand.

1. Cutting before the capsules open — The plants are cut by hand while the upper capsules are still closed, since ripe capsules split and drop their seed.Why: Limits the seed lost to shattering in the field.
2. Drying in stooks — The cut plants are bundled and left to dry in stooks before they are threshed.
3. Threshing and winnowing — The dried bundles are taken to a threshing floor, threshed and winnowed, and the cleaned seed is bagged. Where machines are used they are set to a low drum speed and a wide gap, to avoid damaging the seed.Why: Damaged seed gives discoloured or rancid oil.

Mostly a smallholder crop, often intercropped or grown in strips with maize or sorghum, which also shelter it from wind. The seedbed is prepared as for small grains and harrowed just before sowing, because the seedlings grow slowly until they are about 10 cm tall and compete badly with weeds; two or three shallow weedings are usual. In Asia it is often sown into rice stubble as a second crop. Smallholder yields in pure stands seldom exceed 500 kg per hectare.

A crop of the tropics and subtropics, grown mainly between 25°S and 25°N and, with newer cultivars, as far as 40°N. It needs heat: temperatures around 30 °C encourage germination, early growth and flowering, below 20 °C they are delayed and below 10 °C they stop. It is a short-day plant. Established plants stand drought well and seedlings do not. A rainfall of 500–650 mm gives an excellent crop, provided the rain stops as the first capsules ripen; heavy rain at flowering cuts the yield sharply, and the plant does not tolerate waterlogging.

Buy the whole seed raw and toast it as it is needed. The smell that sesame is used for is made by heating, and seed toasted in the pan is at that point freshly made.

• Clean, whole seed, free of dust, stalk and foreign seed.
• A mild, clean taste when a pinch is chewed, with no bitterness.
• The type the dish asks for: hulled or unhulled, white or black.

• Sesame seeds — a declarable allergen in the EU and US

Both handbook accounts call sesame an oil crop of great antiquity, and they do not agree on where it began: the earlier favours Africa, the later the Indian subcontinent. They agree that seed excavated at Harappa was dated to 2000 BC and that by then sesame was an important crop in Mesopotamia, which became the centre from which it reached the Mediterranean. The later account has it a prominent oil crop in China by the second century BC and a valuable cargo between India and the Mediterranean, along the Arabian and Red Sea coasts, at the same period. These are a handbook’s summary of the literature and not excavation reports.

1. About 2000 BC · Harappa, Pakistan; Mesopotamia

   Sesame seed found in an excavation at Harappa was dated at 2000 BC, according to both handbook accounts, which also describe it as an important crop in Mesopotamia by that time.

   A handbook’s report of a find, not the excavation report itself, which was not read.

2. Second century BC · China; the Arabian Sea and Red Sea

   A prominent oil crop in China, and a valuable cargo in the trade between India and the Mediterranean along the southern Arabian and Red Sea coasts.

3. 2005

   The name Sesamum indicum was conserved against Sesamum orientale, ending the use of two Linnaean names for one plant.

Charred sesame seed was recovered by flotation at Wari-Bateshwar in Bangladesh, an Early Historic site dating mainly between 400 and 100 BC. The report’s authors say finds of sesame have generally been rare, probably because the seed is oily, and list others from sites in the Ganges valley, from southern Thailand in the late first millennium BC and from fourteenth-century Cambodia. They treat it as an oilseed that may have been brought into cultivation in the Indus valley region by Harappan times.

Traded almost entirely as seed; only minor quantities of oil and cake are shipped. The handbook puts international trade at about 800,000 t a year by 2005, with Sudan, India, China and Ethiopia the main exporters in 2000–2003 and Japan, South Korea and China the main importers. The figures are of that period.