Why sesame oil should still smell like sesame

Have you ever opened a bottle labelled sesame — and smelled almost nothing?

What supermarket sesame often goes through

A lot of “sesame oil” on a shop shelf has been refined: high heat, often chemical solvents, then a deodorising step so the oil looks clear and lasts a long time. The seed’s own smell is treated as a problem to be removed.

Cold-pressing is the older idea. The oil is squeezed from the seed — no hexane, no added heat to strip it. What was in the seed is still in the bottle, including the aroma you want for talimpu.

What the research actually found

The smell staysUnrefined sesame keeps compounds the seed already had — including the ones that make talimpu smell like itself, not like “oil”.

According to a study published in Frontiers in Nutrition, hosted on PubMed Central, cold-pressed oils keep a larger share of the seed’s minor compounds than refined oils. For sesame, the review groups those “unsaponifiables” — sterols, tocopherols, and sesame’s own lignans — as part of what you keep when you do not refine the oil away.

That is a mill story, not a medicine story. In the kitchen it means something simple: unrefined sesame still smells like sesame. On hot rice, you should know what you poured.

If you cannot tell it is sesame with your eyes closed, it is the wrong bottle for the rice.

How we do it at Masalaa.com

We press sesame on a hydraulic press in Hyderabad, in small batches, without adding heat or chemical solvents. We pack after PhonePe confirms. The bottle is for talimpu and the days you want the oil to show — not for a health claim.