Roasted Sesame Seed Salt / Gomashio
Roasted Sesame Seed Salt, or Gomashio, is the inspired pairing of ground, roasted goma, sesame, and shio, salt. Used as a dry condiment throughout Japan for millennia, Gomashio has a nutty, earthy, faintly sweet, and lightly salty flavour, deliciously marvelous for adding to a multitude of dishes.
Servings: 1 half cup
Ingredients
- ½ cup roasted sesame seeds black, white, golden or a mixture of your choice *see note
- 1.5 teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt *see note
- Additional 1-2 teaspoon whole roasted sesame seeds optional
Instructions
- Using a clean spice grinder, or food processor (a mini chopper or stick blender chopper bowl attachment may even work) pulse ½ cup of sesame seeds and the salt until finely ground but with a few whole seeds still visible - make sure not to overgrind into a damp paste.
- If you want a mixture of finely ground seeds and whole seeds in your final condiment, add in the optional 1-2 teaspoon of whole sesame seeds into your ground mixture and combine. Scrape the final mixture into a small airtight glass jar, use regularly, and enjoy!
Notes
If you happen to have pre-roasted Japanese sesame seeds handy, use them as this makes the process even quicker!
If not, instead use the called for quantity of raw unhulled sesame seeds (instead of pre-roasted seeds) and toast them in a pan on the stovetop on medium heat until the seeds are golden and fragrant. Don’t leave the seeds alone to toast as they can quickly burn closer to the end of their cooking time (don’t ask me how I know this!).
If toasting black sesame seeds, a great little trick is to put a few white sesame seeds in the pan to see when the seeds are properly toasted, as black sesame seeds don’t have a readily visible colour change when toasted (or burnt for that matter).
You can also toast your salt in the same pan and at the same time as your sesame seeds to imbue even more sesame flavour into your finished mixture.
I love the ratio of salt to sesame in this mixture, but if salt intake is a concern, use kosher salt, which is less salty than sea salt, or reduce the amount of salt used to 1 tsp.