Chocolate Tahini Shortbread Cookies

Illustration: Tram Nguyen

I try not to post too many cookie recipes on here, because cookie recipes = cookie testing = cookies lying around the house, and frankly I have no willpower in the face of freshly baked cookies. I am not one to deprive myself of treats, but I suspect it is less than healthy to eat a full batch of butter/flour/sugar/chocolate in a single sitting by oneself more than, say, once a month, and recipe testing usually requires making lots of batches of something in relatively short order. Because my version of restraint is by most standards, uh, pretty modest, I do my best to not tempt fate too often.

But while I was obsessively reading the wonderful Zahav cookbook last December, I started to get very excited about tahini. Tahini in general is amazing, one of the best flavors on the planet, but according to Zahav author Michael Solomonov there is one brand of it that is superior. And this brand must be purchased online. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I don’t want to be stuck without the proper tahini in a pinch.” (At this moment I imagined that I would be whipping up fresh hummus day and night, so inspired was I by this cookbook.) I went to purchase the tahini and noticed that Soom, the company Solomonov recommended, also sells a version in…chocolate. Well. It seemed almost irresponsible not to try it. As a “food blogger” and such. Right? Right. I bought a few jars of both.

Flash forward to a few weeks later. I had by this point made several batches of glorious hummus with this great tahini. I had also discovered that the chocolate flavor was quite delicious, kind of like if tahini met Nutella. It was becoming dangerous to have it in the house. At one point Rob and I found ourselves eating it out of the jar, with spoons. It was not a good look. (Literally. Tahini is kind of messy and I was getting it all over my face.) “You need to get rid of this,” Rob told me. It was true. We could not be trusted to not eat it all in one sitting.

So I used it to make cookies. This was very easy to do, because the Zahav cookbook has an incredibly simple and fantastic tahini shortbread cookie recipe in it, and I just swapped in the chocolate for the standard flavor and finished the cookies off with a dusting of flaky sea salt. I can’t take any credit for the recipe, but I do think the world deserves to know about these cookies, because they are very good. It turns out that sesame + chocolate + salt + butter is a winning combination. Now everyone go load up on Zahav cookbooks and Soom tahini—in sesame and chocolate flavors both.