In the September garden, sesame plants dry from the bottom up, their lowest pods turning yellow first. In the Northern Hemisphere, it's a crop you sow in May or June and cut in September. Right about now, the stalks that grew tall and straight all summer get bundled and stood upside down to dry. Tap the dried stalks with a stick and the seeds come showering down. Hold that handful in your palm, and one question comes up more than any other: how much of this do I need to eat for it to do me any good?
The First Name in Your Search Results: Sesamin
Look up sesame (Sesamum indicum), and the first name you'll run into is sesamin. It usually comes with a line about lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, and below that, more often than not, a photo of capsules. Nobody invented that claim. Several meta-analyses have pooled clinical trials in which people took sesamin and other lignans as supplements, and some have reported a trend toward lower blood lipid and blood pressure readings. But those results only make sense alongside the conditions that produced them.
The Conditions Behind the Studies
The reported numbers came from participants taking a fixed dose of lignans in supplement form. The studies differ in design and length, and their results don't all point the same way. In some trials the markers went down; in others there was no clear difference. That makes it hard to apply those findings to a spoonful of sesame sprinkled over your greens. For now, what we can honestly speak to is what sesame contains.
Holding that line is better for the person doing the eating, too. Sesame is an ordinary seed, grown widely in Sudan, India, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Nigeria. If you start eating it with a specific result already in mind, then when the numbers you hoped for don't show up, you'll end up giving up on a perfectly good ingredient.
What Still Holds Up: The Oil Is Slow to Spoil
Alongside sesamin, sesamol and sesaminol are counted among the lignan-type compounds in sesame. In lab conditions, they've been shown to slow the oxidation of oil, and they're often cited as the reason sesame oil doesn't turn rancid as easily as other oils. That doesn't mean the same thing happens inside your body when you eat it. But it's exactly what's happening in the bottle of oil in your kitchen.
Most of the fat in sesame oil is unsaturated, and the oil carries vitamin E as well. Oils high in unsaturated fat go bad faster the more they're exposed to light, heat, and air. Even with lignans slowing things down, a bottle kept in the wrong spot won't get much benefit from them.
- Keep your sesame oil away from the stove, somewhere cool and dark.
- Store toasted sesame seeds in an airtight container, and instead of toasting a big batch at once, try toasting only what you'll use within a few weeks.
- Once a bottle is open, let your nose be the judge. If the nutty aroma fades and a stale, flat smell takes its place, the oil has started to oxidize.
What Sesame Does at the Table
Perilla (deulkkae, literally "wild sesame," though it's actually a mint-family herb) is used for its leaves and its oil; sesame is used as toasted seeds and sesame oil. At the table, its job is to add aroma and fat.
Finishing namul, blanched vegetables tossed with seasonings, with kkaesogeum (sesame salt) and sesame oil is a long-standing technique in Korean cooking. It brings out a toasty, nutty fragrance, and the fat-soluble nutrients in the vegetables are better absorbed when there's some fat alongside them. For leafy greens you blanch first, like spinach, try drizzling just half a spoonful of sesame oil over them at the very end of tossing.
Sesame pairs well with seaweed, too, wakame (miyeok) among them. Add sesame oil and toasted seeds to miyeok-guk (a soup simmered with wakame) or a dressed wakame salad, and sesame's fat joins the minerals from the sea. Kkaesogeum, made by crushing toasted sesame seeds with salt, delivers plenty of nutty flavor in small amounts, so there's no need to use a whole spoonful.
If you do just one thing today, move the sesame oil from beside the stove to a dark cupboard. And if you have namul to toss for dinner tonight, a sprinkle of toasted sesame on top is all it needs. For sesame's sowing and harvest months and a rundown of what's in it, see the sesame entry in the Homiclub Crop Guide.
