This subtly Sweet Tahini Sauce is creamy with a bit of tang, perfect for drizzling over a fruit salad or ice cream, or dipping in your favorite fruits. With just 5 ingredients, this creamy Tahini Fruit Dip comes together in the blender in under 5 minutes!
If you love sweet dips and sauces, try my vegan fruit dip and my sweet cherry jam!
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About this recipe
Sweet Low Histamine Sauce: with a seed butter at the base, this is a great vegan-friendly dessert sauce for topping ice cream, chia pudding, overnight oats, or even a fruit salad. Much like the other low histamine sauces on the site, this sweet tahini dressing is versatile enough to be used as a dip, sauce, or drizzle for your favorite bread and fruit slices.
Anti-inflammatory Recipe: between the vitamin C-rich lemon juice and the nutrients in the plain applesauce, this tahini fruit dip is low in sugar & packed with strongly antihistamine foods. This means that they contain abundant plant chemicals which inherently help your body calm histamine production.
Easy & Protein-Rich: more vegan-friendly recipes is probably the number one request in my inbox. This sweet tahini sauce is both my answer to that request and a response to my current diet, which is low histamine, as well as free from grains. Because of that, I'm always looking for ways to make fruits and veggies more interesting.
Ingredients
Applesauce: while you can make your own apple sauce or use a tolerated store-bought brand, it's important to use a fruit puree here, as it's integral to a decent texture & sweetness in the tahini dip.
Tahini: another word for hulled, toasted, and ground sesame seeds, tahini has long been used in Mediterranean cuisine to make sauces and even desserts.
However in recent years it's become popular as an alternative to peanut butter and a binder for on-the-go snacks. In this sweet tahini dressing recipe, it functions to both add a creaminess and a heft to the sauce, so it stays dairy-free and without thickeners.
Lemon Juice: the kick of acid from the lemon juice really accentuates and balances out the nutty, mildly bitter flavor of the tahini without adding too much flavor of its own. Additionally, lemon contains loads of vitamin C, a known mast cell stabilizer, though some people are sensitive to citrus-derived forms of it.
Honey or Maple Syrup: there are a multitude of low histamine sweeteners you can use in a sweet tahini sauce, but it's very important to use a liquid sweetener like honey or maple syrup. For non-vegans, by far my favorite option is honey. Not only is it great for the digestive system, but manuka honey has been proven to lessen allergy symptoms, like those of histamine intolerance.
Vanilla Powder: this adds a mild sense of sweetness and complexity to the sweet tahini dip, without the need for any extra sweetener. Vanilla also does a great job at complementing almost any other flavor you'd like to add.
Cinnamon: this optional ingredient could potentially bother some people with histamine intolerance, but especially in such small quantities as you'd use for this tahini fruit dip.
How to make sweet tahini sauce: step-by-step instructions
Step 1. Measure out all your ingredients into the blender, then mix everything together in 3-second pulses until well-blended.
Step 2. The sauce is ready once it reaches your desired consistency. You can further sweeten & thin it out by blending it more with some apple juice or extra maple syrup, if desired. (Yields 1 cup)
Recipe notes & tips
Whipping the Sauce: if using this as a sweet fruit dip, it's important to whip the finished tahini sauce near the end, because otherwise it may not blend all the ingredients together as well. If you still find the sauce too thick to drizzle or spread when you're adding it to your bowl, add a tablespoon of water to the processor with the remaining sauce, and blend until re-whipped.
Customizing Flavors: while the base sweet sauce tastes a lot like tahini, the spices come through holding their own. If you want to have this regularly, there are several delicious ways to change up the flavor.
If you're not eating low histamine, you could even add a tablespoon or two of cocoa powder to make it chocolatey, or sweeten it further. If you leave out the cinnamon, an equal amount of ground cardamom would be a delicious swap.
Freezing The Sauce: you can freeze this sweet tahini sauce in an air-tight container for up to one year. Simply put it in the microwave on low for a minute to defrost, or leave it in the fridge overnight to use in the morning (it may still need some time at room temp or in the microwave).
What to eat with sweet tahini dip
- fresh apple slices
- homemade vanilla flax seed pudding
- overnight oats with frozen fruit
- make it less sweet and use as salad dressing
- low histamine fruit salad
- creamy chia & flax pudding
Homemade Sweet Tahini Sauce Recipe Card
As always, if you like the recipe, I really appreciate a 5-star review or a comment!
📖 Recipe
Sweet Tahini Sauce (Soy-Free, Vegan)
Ingredients
- ½ Cup applesauce
- ⅓ Cup tahini
- 1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 1 Tablespoon maple syrup
- ⅛ teaspoon vanilla powder
- ⅛ teaspoon cinnamon optional
- Dash of sea salt
Instructions
- Measure out all your ingredients into the blender, then mix everything together in 3-second pulses until well-blended.
- The sauce is ready once it reaches your desired consistency; you can further sweeten & thin it out with apple juice or more maple syrup, if desired.
Shell says
Hi, I am confused about why a low histamine recipe would include lemon. Can you clarify this for me? Thank you!
Max says
Sure, Shell! Small amounts of lemon and lime juice are often well-tolerated, according to my doctor, and I myself never had any issues with small amounts (a teaspoon or less). So I do use lemon in some of my recipes, but always a small amount and I'd always recommend testing out ingredients individually before reintroducing them in a recipe. I've also learned through my nutrition studies that lemons are indeed not directly high histamine, but they do bother some people, especially when they're in particularly reactive state, due to the presence of citric acid and quercetin (both of which are otherwise mast cell stabilizers, and do not bother most people). So if you already know lemon bothers you, then avoid those recipes.
Wendy says
Didn't read entire page...all the ingredients but Tahiti and apple are high histamine 🙁
Max says
That's simply not true-- cinnamon, explicityly labeled as an optional ingredient, can be an issue for some people in large amounts, and vitamin C-rich lemon juice isn't always tolerated when you're in a particularly sensitive state, but everything in the recipe is low histamine. If any of those ingredients explicitly bother you, however, then just don't follow the recipe. Simple as that. 🙂