Rachel Belle’s cookbook ‘Open Sesame’ is a love letter to tahini

When the pandemic hit, I was a feature reporter at Seattle’s KIRO Radio. While I was still required to report to the newsroom for my shifts, guests were no longer allowed into the building, which kicked off two years of Zoom interviews.

In August 2022 we were finally allowed to welcome guests back into the studio, and the first post-pandemic person I interviewed in real life was Jen Worick, then-publisher of Sasquatch Books. I was working on a story that posed this question: Does checking out books at the library endanger the survival of local, independent bookstores, publishing companies and authors?

Jen and I hit it off immediately, chatting enthusiastically for 30 minutes before I even turned on the mic. Before she left, I hit her with my highly successful, patented second grade method for making friends. I asked, “Do you want to be my friend?” She accepted the offer.

Three months later Jen messaged me, saying she had heard an episode of my podcast Your Last Meal in which I passionately waxed on about my love of tahini (including the importance of using a high-quality brand) and my long journey to finding the perfect hummus recipe that tasted like the one from my childhood. Sasquatch was thinking of making a cookbook focused on sesame, and she asked if I would like to write a proposal.

If Jen and I had done our interview over Zoom, we probably would have exchanged pleasantries, jumped into the interview, hung up and moved on with our lives. Instead, I have a new friend and a new cookbook, Open Sesame, focused on one of my favorite flavors.

I have wanted to write a book since I was 4, and as an adult working in food media who frequently reads cookbooks cover to cover in bed; who gets more excited about finding a new dumpling joint than the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl; who is in a cooking club and who curates and leads food crawls for her friends, being offered a cookbook deal was a dream come true.

The most common question I’ve been asked about the book is: “Why sesame?” For one, as the daughter of an Israeli, my blood type is tahini+.

For centuries, tahini has been a staple ingredient in the Fertile Crescent, eaten in countries like Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. After Israel became a state in 1948, Jewish immigrants from around the world embraced the local cuisine, including my dad who, as a baby, settled there with his parents, Holocaust survivors from Romania.

My dad touched down on American soil in the 1970s, to attend college in Los Angeles, and has lived in California ever since. I grew up in the Bay Area, eating tahini laced babaganoush and hummus at home (before it was sold at every grocery store) and plenty of sesame-spiked Asian cuisine in restaurants — dim sum on Clement Street in San Francisco, sesame-oil-slicked soba noodles and those tiny bricks of sticky, crunchy sesame seed candy wrapped in clear plastic.

When I sat down to brainstorm sesame recipes for the book proposal, I scribbled out 40 ideas in 30 minutes. I was excited! I felt passionate! It sounds cliche, but this cookbook, the idea for which came out of nowhere, poured out of me (like tahini onto a Sesame Crusted Waffle).

I also had a mission. Have you ever finished an entire jar of tahini? How many times have you bought a bottle, used ¼ cup to make hummus or a salad dressing and let it languish in the back of the fridge for 11 months before throwing it away? *Slowly raises hand.*

I wanted to show people new ways to cook and bake with tahini, as well as sesame oil, sesame seeds and black sesame paste.

I had only six months to develop and test recipes like Chocolate Miso Whoopie Pies with Tahini Cream, Falafel-Spiced Tahini Deviled Eggs with Crispy Chickpeas and Congee with Sesame Soy Mushrooms and Jammy Korean Marinated Eggs (Mayak Gyeran). An avid and experimental home cook, I have recipe-tested for a number of cookbooks, which turned out to be an extremely useful, fast-tracked education on how to write recipes of my own.

Once I felt I’d perfected a dish, I’d send the recipe off to one of my many testers, who pointed out things like the sesame rice noodle soup had a lot of bok choy (oops! I meant baby bok choy!); the tahini potato salad was just OK (I immediately nixed it and came up with a recipe for Crushed Potatoes with Tahini Feta Queso and Olive Tapenade that got a “10/10 no notes!”); or that the furikake wasn’t sticking to the Chex cereal in the Crunchy Furikake Snack Mix (it needed to be added at a different stage in the recipe).

I found myself measuring cucumbers with a ruler (everyone’s cucumbers are different sizes!), visiting the grocery store daily, washing so many dishes (I repeat: so many!) and plagued with immigrant-daughter guilt when I had to compost three cakes in a row that refused to bake through.

In the span of 18 months, the recipes were developed and tested, the headnotes and introduction were written, the beautiful photographs were taken and the designer played with fonts and color and added cute little details. I went through several rounds of editing; we went back and forth with Penguin Random House about choosing the cover; and eventually the book was sent off to China to be printed.

Once it was gone and I couldn’t make any more edits, I panicked slightly: Were the recipes good?? Or were they all garbage?? (Spoiler alert: They’re good! Phew!)

Open Sesame celebrates the tiny, versatile sesame seed in many of its forms: the earthy warmth of sesame oil shimmering on the surface of a rice noodle soup; the toasty crunch of sesame seed-crusted chicken schnitzel; the deep dark nuttiness of black sesame paste blended with dates, banana and milk.

The book was a labor of love and the best art project I’ve ever worked on. And somehow, I’m still not sick of tahini.