What Levantine sauce combines tahini, water, garlic, and lemon? The answer is tarator.
Levantine tarator is a smooth sesame sauce made by loosening tahini with water and mixing it with lemon juice, garlic, and usually salt. The result is creamy, nutty, tangy, and aromatic. Its consistency can range from a thick dip to a pourable dressing, depending on how much water is added.
Tarator is commonly served with falafel, shawarma, grilled meat, and fish. In Lebanon, it is traditionally paired with cooked snails in a dish called bzeh ma' tarator. Parsley may be added to a green-herb variation sometimes known as baqdunsieh. Tahini itself is a paste made from ground sesame seeds, so tarator is not the same thing as plain tahini.
The name can cause confusion because “tarator” describes different sauces around the region. Turkish tarator is often walnut-based and may contain bread, vinegar, or oil, while Balkan tarator can refer to a yogurt-and-cucumber soup. In the Levantine context, however, the canonical answer is the tahini-based garlic-and-lemon sauce.