Sesame Oil

Sesame is the oldest oilseed pressed on the Indian subcontinent — older than the written record of its pressing. Its grammar is built into language: til gives Tamil its name for oil itself, enney. The Ayurveda calls it the queen of oils.

We draw til from the first winter crop, when the seed has the highest oil content and the lowest moisture. The seed is white til with a small fraction of black, unhulled and unrefined. The press is cold. The flavour is the test — a light nuttiness on the tongue, no bitterness, no roast.

Til oil belongs to two kitchens. In the South — Tamil, Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka — it is the tadka oil, the first oil into the pan, the carrier for mustard seeds and dried red chilli. In the North and West, it is the oil of til chikki, of til-gud on Sankranti, of the daily abhyanga massage before the morning bath.

In Ayurvedic practice, sesame oil is also the oil of gandusha — oil pulling. We do not make therapeutic claims. We will only say: this is the oil the texts named, drawn the way the texts described, and the practice is older than the language we are writing this in.

The Charaka Samhita, the foundational Ayurvedic text, describes sesame oil — til taila — as the most sattvic of the cooking oils. The reason it gives is the same one modern chemistry confirms: sesamin and sesamolin, the natural antioxidants in unrefined sesame, make the oil unusually stable to heat and unusually slow to spoil. The text was right for the wrong reason. We are content with it being right.

Storage

Sesame oil keeps well at room temperature in a dark cupboard. The first-press oil we draw in winter has a shelf life of about twelve months from the press date — long for an oilseed of its kind, short by the supermarket standard. The reason it lasts is the same reason it tastes the way it does: the antioxidant compounds are still in the bottle, not stripped out in a refinery.