Tilachi chutney

A dry sesame chutney

Tilachi chutney is a Marathi dry chutney, a ground seasoning powder rather than a wet sauce. Its base is til, sesame, roasted slowly and ground with dry coconut and garlic, with chilli, cumin, tamarind and a little sugar giving heat and sourness. Sujata Nerurkar's Royal Chef page, from 2019, gives the version above and describes sesame as a food traditionally eaten in winter for its warmth, and as a good fallback when there is no vegetable in the house.

The page does not say how it is eaten. Dry chutneys of this kind usually go beside bread or rice, but no inspected source here says so for this one.

The source batch

The recipe is for 8 to 10 people and takes about 30 minutes: 2 cups plain, unpolished sesame seeds, half a cup of dry coconut, 10 to 12 garlic cloves, 2 teaspoons red chilli powder, 1 teaspoon cumin, a 1-inch piece of tamarind, 1 teaspoon sugar and salt to taste. Sesame is roasted on low heat until fragrant and lightly browned, the grated coconut until light pink-golden, and both are ground fine with the rest. The page gives no cup weights, salt quantity, roasting times or yield. The tamarind is described only as 1 inch, which likely means a small piece.

Tilkut, a coarser relative

A separate 2017 Marathi page from Chavishta Food calls its sesame, coconut and peanut powder tilkut. It uses 1 vati of sesame, a quarter vati of dry coconut and a quarter vati of peanut powder with tamarind, chilli and spices. The ingredients are roasted and pulsed coarsely. The page warns that longer grinding releases oil and makes the powder moist. The vati is not defined as a volume and storage is not stated. It is a different formula, with peanut, and is not a variant of the recipe above.

Uttarakhand sesame chutneys are wet and different

Sesame chutney is also made in Uttarakhand, as a wet condiment. An ICAR-VPKAS cookbook of Uttarakhand cuisine lists 100 g sesame, one lemon, 5 to 10 g cumin, green chillies and salt; sesame is roasted with the cumin, ground with chillies and salt, and lemon is added. It says the condiment is generally eaten in winter. A separate eUttaranchal page for a Pahadi-style version uses 3 to 4 tablespoons of sesame, coriander, garlic, green chillies, 3 to 4 tablespoons of yoghurt or lemon juice, salt and optional sugar, and also describes winter use with pairings.

These are separate source batches from a different region. The winter descriptions are not prevalence surveys and neither establishes an origin.

Roasting, not fermentation

The dry and wet versions all roast and grind. None describes a starter or any fermentation. Roasting changes the flavour and texture of the seeds and coconut, and the lemon or yoghurt in the Uttarakhand versions adds acidity but not a fermentation stage.

Limits

No inspected source gives a tested storage time, a measured water activity or a moisture limit for dry sesame chutney. The bottle in the instructions is a container, not a preservation step. Sesame is an allergen, and the limited food-safety excerpt found for this entry does not settle current Indian labelling rules. A NIFTEM cookbook lists a Til ki Chutney, but its PDF could not be retrieved, so nothing here rests on it.