Crunchy Pumpkin with Tahini

Long before molecular gastronomy was all the rage, Turkish chefs were using chemistry to create sweets and jams. By soaking hard-shelled fruits and vegetables in quicklime, they’d soften the interior and crystallise the exterior. The most common cases for treatment were watermelon rinds and unripened figs, eggplants, walnuts and olives.

You can’t use quicklime in food preparation these days, but you can get a similar effect with pickling lime or burnt lime (calcium hydroxi