Black Sesame Brownies (Sort Of)

This wonderfully unusual sweet is here via Zen Cho. She’s one of my favourite writers, balancing this marvellously frank humour and keen imagination with incisive observations.  The first time I read ‘House of Aunts’, for example, I was left gasping with laughter throughout, and I had to go and lie down face-first on the sofa by the end of the story because it was so good.

As soon as I read her description and saw her pictures, I absolutely knew I wanted these brownies. In fact, as I told her, I felt a kind of rage to make them. Black sesame is wonderful, possessing the same fragrant richness as their blond cousins but they are deeper, earthier, stopping just short of bitterness.

So to have a brownie densely filled with such a delicious thing is a very fine idea.

The first step is to get hold of black sesame seeds or black tahini. I got very lucky and my parents gladly gave me a spare bag of whole seeds, but if you google for it you can find 300g bags of it for a few quid. I think you might also try larger supermarkets (especially Asian shops) and health food shops.

If you’ve got whole seeds, you’ll want to make sure you have the means to turn them into paste. Initially I tried to grind them with a pestle and mortar, and–well, you know, there is a reason why Japanese monks felt that this very long, tedious task was good for building the characters of novice monks: even a very rough grinding, the kind needed for this recipe, takes a while and is hot work. A decent-ish immersion blender or food processor is recommended, I have a blue and white one from Sainsbury’s which was about £13 and has seen me through lots of soups and sauces for the past 6 months. (Let us not speak of the bitterness of the £5 mini-chopper from Morrison’s which immediately failed to make breadcrumbs and has been banished to the very top of the cupboard to solemnly reflect upon its incompetence and failure.)

I wanted this to be as close to a brownie as possible, so I altered the recipe slightly according to what I’ve learned as a very greedy, determined maker and eater of brownies over the years: use no (or very little) leavening ingredients, keep the sugar fairly high, balancing it with salt and the dark complexity of good chocolate (or in this case black sesame) and, finally and most importantly, underbake it. This creates a fudgy and intense brownie, the kind I prefer.

I wouldn’t have minded if the result had turned out cake-like, but I’m glad that these were fudgy and dense, with the richness of the black sesame and the butter coming through wonderfully.  As I didn’t want a very sharp and intrusive sweetness, I decided to use palm sugar, whose gentle sweetness is caramel-like in quantity. A pinch of sea salt flakes in the batter added salty-sweet interest. My parents (Pearents?), who possess between them a sour/salt/umami tooth and a shuddering aversion to saccharine desserts and baked goods, approved of these brownies and ate them with unbelievable speed.

My other taste-tester, Mr. Pear, chose these brownies over a slab of dark chocolate.  These are ridiculously easy to eat. They’re not light, exactly, but they’re not as ridiculously rich and gooey as chocolate brownies can get so you can hoover up slice after slice without feeling wearily cocoa-thickened.

The only baking tin I had on hand was a 9″ tin which meant the brownies turned out thinner, especially because of the lack of baking powder, but I (and my taste-testers) think this was to the better. We felt this was the right amount of dense richness; if you want it very gooey then try baking it at a shorter time, bearing it mind that it’ll cook and set a bit further with the residual heat. There’s also nothing to stop you baking this in a smaller tin or scaling it up if you feel you’d like a deeper brownie.

As a last note, I’m not sure what affects the colour of the brownies, some of them turning a slate grey while others remain a tar black even if you follow the same recipes and have–as far as one can quantify these things–equally black sesame seeds. It doesn’t affect the taste and in any case I think both are elegant and uncommon colours to find in a baked good.

BLACK SESAME BROWNIES
Adapted from Pig Pig’s Corner
Makes 1 x 9″ (23 cm) square tin. Store tightly wrapped in foil or in an airtight container.

150g unsalted butter, melted
100g black sesame seeds + 1 extra tablespoon for sprinkling
125g palm sugar, chopped
1 tsp light soy sauce
2 eggs
Pinch of salt (flaky sea salt preferable but any type is fine)
100g plain flour

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius/160 fan.

Lightly grease and line a 9″ (23 cm) square cake tin with baking paper.

Blend (with immersion blender or food processor) the melted butter and black sesame seeds together until they form a rough, clumpy paste–it really doesn’t need to be as smooth and homogeneous as bought tahini.

Add the black sesame paste to a medium-sized pan along with the palm sugar sugar and soy sauce, cooking them over a moderate heat until fragrant. The oil will split but, after a few further minutes, the mixture will then re-homogenise and thicken slighty. Immediately remove from heat and leave this to cool until it’s at least warm to the touch.

Add the eggs one at a time to the cooled black sesame mixture, mixing til just smooth–just a wooden spoon or maryse is perfect here. Gently fold in the plain flour until just combined.

Pour batter into the prepared tin, sprinkle the remaining tablespoon of black sesame seeds on top, and bake for about 10 – 12 mins or until the top looks dry. I baked it for 12 minutes and a toothpick came out clean, which resulted in a completely set and fudgy brownie.

Cut into squares and hoard them selfishly because you are secretly Smaug.