Tehina-Lemon Sauce

If you find a good, authentic falafel joint, you will most probably have some variant of the following sauce dribbled into your pita. The taste is quite unlike almost anything else that I know of, but it combines sublimely well with the other ingredients and provides an excellent contrast to the red hot chili sauce also lurking in there.

Ingredients

• 1 cup of yogurt (not the low-fat kind, please)
• 1 cup of tehina
• 1/3 cup of lemon juice (freshly squeezed is better but not essential)
• 1 clove of garlic, crushed (optional)
• 1/4 cup parsley, chopped (optional)

Instructions

1. Combine tehina and yogurt.
2. Titrate in the lemon juice, a tablespoon at a time, until the sauce looks and tastes Good^(TM). It should be more spoonable than pourable.
3. Stir in the garlic and/or parsley if you feel like it -- they change the taste, and not necessarily for the better. YMMV.
4. Cram into a pita pocket along with falafel, Israeli salad, pickles, a few chilis and a dash of hot sauce, and devour voraciously.

Alternative versions

• If you substitute water for yogurt and are careful with the lemon juice, you'll get a simple but tasty tehina dip instead, good for dipping your pita even without the falafel on the side. Still, when combined with anything hot, the yogurt is essential for cooling your taste buds (cf. raita).
• And if you omit the tehina but are sure to include the garlic, you'll get something resembling the yogurt sauce Turks put in their kebab.