Italian Sesame Cookies Recipe

What Italian sesame cookies actually are

Walk into almost any bakery in Palermo and you will find a tray of small, oblong cookies buried under a thick coat of sesame seeds. Locals call them reginelle, biscotti regina, or in Sicilian dialect giuggiulena. The dough itself is plain and unassuming, close to a soft shortbread, flavored with little more than lemon or orange zest and sometimes a whisper of vanilla or anise. What makes the cookie is the shell. Every piece of dough is rolled in milk or egg wash and then packed with sesame seeds before it goes into the oven, so the seeds toast in place and turn deeply nutty while the inside stays tender.

They are not sweet in the way an American cookie is sweet. Sicilians treat them more like a savory companion to coffee, tea, or a small glass of Marsala after dinner, the way you might treat a plain biscuit rather than a dessert.

Do Italian sesame cookies contain tahini

No, the traditional Sicilian recipe does not use tahini. The dough is built from flour, sugar, fat, and eggs, and the sesame flavor comes entirely from the toasted seeds pressed onto the surface, not from any sesame paste mixed into the batter.

The confusion is understandable. Tahini shows up in several other sesame based cookies around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, including Turkish susamli kurabiye and Levantine barazek, both of which either mix tahini into the dough or use it as the glue that holds the seeds on. Because all of these cookies look similar from the outside, coated in the same golden seeds, recipe sites and search results have blurred the line between them for years.

If you came here specifically wanting a sesame cookie with tahini folded into it, you have not wasted your trip. Further down this page is a tested tahini variation built on top of the classic Italian dough, clearly separated from the traditional method so you always know which one you are following.

Where the recipe comes from

Sicily sits at the center of the Mediterranean, and its kitchens carry the fingerprints of every civilization that ever landed there. Sesame seeds arrived with Arab traders during the ninth and tenth centuries, alongside citrus, rice, and sugar cane, and the island never let go of them. The Sicilian word for sesame, giuggiulena, comes directly from the Arabic term for the same seed, a linguistic trace of nearly two centuries of Arab rule that survives in the kitchen long after the political history faded from memory.

The name biscotti regina, meaning queen's cookies, is usually credited to Margherita di Savoia, the queen who also lent her name to pizza Margherita. According to the popular story she was fond of visiting Sicilian pastry shops in person and would occasionally knight a baker whose sweets impressed her. It is a charming tale, but reliable documentation of it is thin, and food historians treat it as folklore that stuck rather than a confirmed fact. What is better documented is the cookie's working class origin. Long before it carried a royal nickname, it was a cheap, filling, portable snack for Sicilian farm laborers, made with lard because butter was a luxury most households did not keep on hand.

Facts most articles leave out

• Giuggiulena means two different things. The word refers to both this cookie and a completely separate honey and sesame brittle, closer to a torrone or nougat, that Sicilian and Calabrian families make around Epiphany in early January. If a recipe you find online produces a hard, glassy candy instead of a cookie, you have landed on the other giuggiulena.
• Lard came before butter. The traditional fat is strutto, rendered pork lard, which produces a shorter, more crumbly texture than butter does. Home cooks in Sicily still argue over which version is more authentic.
• The original leavening agent smelled unpleasant on purpose. Before baking powder became common, Sicilian bakers used ammonium carbonate, known as baker's ammonia, which gives an extra crisp texture and releases a sharp smell during baking that fully disappears once the cookies cool.
• They are not twice baked. The word biscotti technically just means cookies in Italian, not the hard, twice baked almond biscotti most people picture. Reginelle are baked once, from a soft dough closer to shortbread.
• Only hulled seeds work. Unhulled sesame seeds turn bitter under dry oven heat, which is why every serious Sicilian baker insists on hulled, pale seeds for the coating rather than the darker unhulled kind sold for savory cooking.
• They have a place on the Day of the Dead table. In Palermo, reginelle are part of the traditional sweets laid out for Festa dei Morti on the second of November, a holiday where children are told that deceased relatives leave gifts and treats overnight.
• Sicily has a distant cousin across the Atlantic. Benne wafers from Charleston, South Carolina, use the same tiny toasted seed and trace back to enslaved West Africans, for whom sesame, called benne, was considered a symbol of good luck. Two completely separate diasporas, Sicilian and West African, ended up building small sesame cookies for very similar reasons an ocean apart.

Ingredients

For the dough

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened (or 1 cup lard for the traditional version)
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon fine salt
• Zest of 1 lemon or orange
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

For coating

• 3 tablespoons whole milk, or 1 egg white beaten with a splash of water
• 1 1/2 cups hulled sesame seeds

Step by step method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until pale and light, about 3 minutes with an electric mixer.
2. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition, then mix in the zest and vanilla.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt together, then add it to the wet mixture in two additions, mixing just until a soft dough forms. Do not overwork it.
4. Wrap the dough and chill it for 30 minutes. This makes it far easier to roll and keeps the cookies from spreading too thin in the oven.
5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, about 175 degrees Celsius, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
6. Pour the milk or egg wash into one shallow bowl and the sesame seeds into another. Break off small pieces of dough and roll them into logs about 3 inches long and 3/4 inch thick.
7. Dip each log fully in the milk or egg wash, then roll it in the sesame seeds, pressing gently so the seeds stick all the way around.
8. Arrange the cookies about an inch apart on the prepared sheets and bake for 18 to 22 minutes, until the seeds are golden brown and the cookies feel firm at the edges.
9. Cool on the pan for 5 minutes before moving the cookies to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

Modern tahini variation, not traditional but excellent

This version is built for anyone who wants the deeper, slightly bitter richness tahini brings, or who wants an egg free way to help the sesame seeds stick. It is a modern adaptation, not something you would find in a Palermo bakery, so treat it as its own recipe rather than a substitute in the classic method above.

• Replace 2 tablespoons of the butter with 2 tablespoons of well stirred, runny tahini, added at the same stage you add the butter.
• For the coating, swap the milk or egg wash for a thin tahini wash made from 2 tablespoons tahini whisked with 1 tablespoon warm water until pourable. Brush it onto each cookie before rolling in sesame seeds.
• To make the variation fully vegan, replace the eggs with 3 tablespoons of aquafaba, the liquid from a can of chickpeas, and use plant based butter in place of dairy butter.

How Italy compares to Turkey, Greece, and the Levant

Sesame cookies show up all around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and each culture treats the seed differently. Here is how the main versions actually differ, since most articles online treat them as interchangeable when they are not.

Storage and freezing

Once fully cooled, keep the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature, where they stay fresh for about two weeks. The dough logs can also be frozen unbaked, before the milk dip and sesame coating, laid flat in a freezer bag for up to two months. Bake them straight from frozen, adding a couple of extra minutes to the bake time. Baked cookies also freeze well for up to three months if layered with wax paper between them.

Frequently asked questions