This paste is often mixed with garlic, lemon, water, and other ingredients to make the tahini dip that you may have tried in restaurants before, perhaps as a dipping sauce, a salad dressing, or as a spread on bread. Better yet (in my opinion), the paste can be sweetened and used to make—you guessed it—tahini pies!
I haven’t done a lot of baking here since my kitchen doesn’t have an electric oven (only a gas oven, which I am too nervous to use), but when my friends and I have tried preparing tahini pies back in the States, only one word was needed to describe how it was done: messily! That’s how I ended up with batter all over our hands, the counter, and even our faces. (Most Cypriots don’t even bake their own tahini pies anymore because it’s such a tricky recipe that it’s easier to simply visit good ol’ Zorbas!)
But in America, we didn’t have Zorbas, so we decided to make our own tahini pies. However, before we could get our hands (and faces) dirty, we had to track down several tricky ingredients that aren’t easily found in the States (more about those in the section about how tahini pies are connected to the local environment and culture!). When we came up short and couldn’t find some of the ingredients, we had to improvise, or make do, with what ingredients were available at our local grocery store.
We then had to do some math. Yes, you heard correctly! Math. Even the math was messy because one difference in following a Cypriot recipe is that measurements are listed not in cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons but in grams (for dry ingredients) and milliliters (for liquid ingredients). That meant we needed to convert between the two systems to figure out how much of each ingredient we needed.
