Halvah is a sweet sesame paste, often used in Middle Eastern cooking. It's a bit dry and so a little crumbly. In shops, it's sometimes flavored, even with chocolate or pistachios, and cut into sedges from a huge wheel, sort of like some forms of hard cheese.

We recently found a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe for halvah brownies that had gone viral. We had to make it. It was indeed delicious, but it only included halvah as a topping for the brownies, a topping that then baked down into them.

We wanted to try our hand at a halvah cookie. So being Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, we set about developing a cookie recipe with halvah as the main ingredient.

The cookies are incredibly crunchy and fragrant. Listen in as we make this recipe and then get cooking!