Hummus Recipe

Description

A paste based on chickpeas and tahini (sesame seed paste) used typically as a vegetable, a spread or a dip. In the UK at present it is typically bought and served in small (e.g. 200 g) tubs. This recipe makes a pudding basin full (about 2 kg) & tastier. It is also slightly less fattening per unit volume.

Summary

• If using dried chickpeas:
  • Soak overnight.
  • Drain.
  • Simmer for 2 hours.
• Blend all the ingredients together.
• Simmer for an hour adding more water if necessary.
• Takes approximately: 10 min work, overnight soaking, 3 h cooking, 12 h total. (Or 1 h cooking, 1 h 10m total if using ready-cooked chickpeas.)

Ingredients

Alternative Ingredients

• Light or dark chickpeas?: Either work but light ones absorb less additional water so a given weight of dried light chickpeas makes about 15% less volume of hummus. This colour of chickpeas turned out to be surprising controversial. I first used dark chickpeas as I thought the darker colour hummus looked tastier but it turned that some people thought the colour was something gone wrong (or because of the yeast extract). As dark (a.k.a. 'desi') chickpeas were typically grown in India whereas light chickpeas (a.k.a. 'kabuli' chickpeas or 'garbanzo' beans) were typically grown in the Mediterranean, the lighter shade of hummus is more traditional in the West.
• Canned chickpeas: An alternative which is more expensive but eliminates the soaking time and reduces cooking time is to use 1.5 kg of ready-cooked tinned chickpeas instead of the 500 g of dried chickpeas. A typical 400 g supermarket can of light chickpeas contains about 240 g of chickpeas when drained so it needs approximately 6 of those cans.
• Yeast extract: This gives umami flavouring, not to an obtrusive degree but it definitely makes the hummus taste richer. Having "Marmite" type yeast extract to hand is very British thing and alternative umami sources can be substituted. Most obviously pure monosodium glutamate (MSG). Other options including misu, kombu type seaweed, hydrolysed vegetable protein & nutritional yeast. Fish sauce works well but only use that if you are sure no vegetarians are going to accidentally eat the hummus. Mushrooms work but give a greyish colour to the hummus. Soy sauce probably has a too distractingly distinctive flavour.

Equipment

Saucepan (preferably with lid). Serving bowl (or serve directly from the saucepan if serving hot rather than putting cold on a buffet). Knife, spoon, spatula or similar to mix with. Spice grinder (or use ready ground spices). Electric liquidiser or blender (or a hand powered one but that will take longer).

Detailed Instructions

1. If not using ready cooked chickpeas, do the following sub-section to cook them (if using ready-cooked tinned chickpeas, just open the tin cans and drain them).
   1. Put the 500 g of dried chickpeas in the saucepan (or multiple smaller saucepans if you don't have one big enough).
   2. Add water to amply cover.
   3. Leave several hours (e.g. overnight) to soak.
   4. Drain the chickpeas (this soaking water reputedly contains substances which are not beneficial to digestion and thereby increase chickpeas' flatulent effect).
   5. Add water to amply cover.
   6. Bring to the boil, cover (to reduce fuel use) and simmer for 2 h, adding more water if necessary (i.e. if more water boils off or is absorbed by the chickpeas than you estimated) and stirring occasionally (so the chickpeas at the cooler top of the pan don't take unnecessarily long to cook).
   7. Drain the liquid off (but retain it this time, as it can be used instead of some of the water when diluting the humus).
2. Put the chickpeas into the blender (it might need several batches as domestic blenders are typically small compared to a serving basin).
3. Add the 150 g of tihini, 100 ml of olive oil, 2 tbsp of lemon juice & 1 tbsp of Marmite to the blender.
4. Peel the half bulbful of garlic cloves (I find it easier if they are microwaved until the skins loosen first, this also makes them less harsh in flavour but take care as they can be burningly hot when straight out of the microwave) and add them to the blender. Alternatively use a garlic press if you have one.
5. Grind the 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of coriander & 1 tsp of black pepper and add them to the blender.
6. Try blending it. If your blender (like mine) cannot cope with such dry ingredients, add water until the mix is blendable. Do not put your fingers in the blender (although I have not had personal experience of that, I imagine it could be very unpleasant) - if the mix does get stuck then poke it an implement like a spatula or chopstick with the blades not spinning (and preferably the blender unplugged &/or vessel removed from the motor unit.
7. Blend it to a smooth paste.
8. Put the paste in a saucepan.
9. Add water to get it to a consistency where it can boil without sticking & burning at the bottom (it does not matter if it is a bit too sloppy as it will firm up in cooking).
10. Bring to the boil, cover (to reduce fuel use) and simmer for 1 h, stirring occasionally. You will probably need to add more water to maintain the consistency as the paste absorbs the water and swells up. You might need to add so much that the increase in volume it exceeds your pan volume and requires splitting between more pans. (Actually this cooking stage is optional. The ingredients have already been cooked beforehand or are edible raw. However it helps to dilute the hummus and the extra cooking of the chickpeas reduces their flatulent effect.)
11. During or after the cooking mix in salt (to your taste versus health preference) and water (to your consistency preference, noting that will get firmer after cooling and settling).
12. If not serving hot as a main meal component, put it in the serving bowl and allow to cool.

Notes

• There are lots of extra ingredients that can be put in for additional taste or visual effect, e.g. sun-dried tomatoes, sliced olives, pine nuts, chilli powder or herbs.
• If the consistency is wrong, that is not a significant problem as it is easy to change. To make it softer, add water and mix or blend it in. To make it firmer, remove water by boiling it down. As the later requires more time (especially if it has already cooled down and one wants it cold) and fuel, it is better to err on the side of too little water initially.
• To stop it looking like an unappetising bowl of brown slop, decorate the top by putting on a decorative edibles, e.g. unchopped herbs, raw baby spinach leaves, sun-dried tomatoes, sliced boiled eggs, sliced olives, whole olives, edible flowers or patterns made with paprika powder.
• Finding Marmite might cause problems for people not in the UK as it is a "yeast extract" spread popular in the UK but unpopular in many other countries including the USA. A similar product popular in Australia is Vegemite. The generic name (both Marmite & Vegemite are trade names) is "yeast extract" but that is ambiguous; it is a vegetarian brown spread with major taste elements being, to me, salt, glutamate & stock and the principle ingredients being yeast and salt. If it is unavailable then some other source of glutamate can be used such as monosodium glutamate powder (which will annoy guests who disapprove of artificial ingredients), 'Maggi' sauce (which will annoy guests who boycott Nestle for unpleasant trade practices), Japanese seaweed (which will annoy guests who think of eating seaweed as weird) or Thai fish sauce (which will annoy guests who are vegetarian). Alternatively miss it out as it is not traditional anyway (but I've found it does improve the taste).
• There are numerous different spellings of hummus in English, it being a transcription of an Arabic word meaning 'chickpeas'. According to Wikipedia, the English spellings of hummus currently include 'hamos', 'houmous', 'hommos', 'hommus', 'hummos', 'hummous' and 'humus' (this latter one being most obvious but avoided as it is also the spelling of a type mud in English!). It turns that the spelling I used before writing this article, 'humous', is hardly used at all (I am not good at spelling!).
• Although most people like it, it has embarrassed some friends who have brought a little tub of supermarket hummus to the same party to see it on the same buffet as a ten times bigger bowl of homemade hummus!

Origin

I first thought of making humus when I went to a food party after an Israeli folk dancing event where the main dish was a large amount of delicious hummus cooked in big pans on a domestic stove (I doubt my hummus is as good as that but at least mine is probably tastier than supermarket hummus). That was in 2001. It was not until 2004 that I tried making my own hummus.

My recipe out started as a mixture of several different & conflicting Greek, Turkish, Israeli & Indian recipes I found on the WWW and on the back of ingredient packets. The common features were the boiled chickpeas, tahini, olive oil and salt. The rest was various flavourings and various cooking methods. I halved the typical amount of olive oil & tahini relative to chickpeas because those are largely fat and therefore unfashionably fattening & unhealthy if eaten in large quantities (tahini was also by far the the most expensive ingredient). I missed out the salt as that is unfashionable too in the UK for health reasons. I also used far less water as it seemed too sloppy & missed out the garlic simply because I had run out. I took it to a Greek dance & food party. Some people liked it but I got complaints about it being too firm, lacking salt and lacking garlic.

The firmness I easily fixed the next time just by adding more water. My mistake was not to realise that it it got firmer after I had put it in the serving bowl as it cooled down and settled down (I guess that was mainly from the chickpea starch spreading out into the water more). The lack of garlic was fixed by adding the garlic as originally intended. The salt was a problem. I tried a monosodium glutamate instead as it enhances flavour (and gives an umami flavour of its own that I like) more than sodium chloride per unit of sodium so less of the harmful sodium was needed. It worked. However I had a complaint about the monosodium glutamate as that is even more unfashionable in the UK due to an old spurious health scare and its chemical sounding name. Hence I replaced it with sodium (salt) & glutamate (seaweed) separately. Chemically it is still equivalent to monosodium glutamate because the same ions are present in solution but it upsets sensibilities less. The result was popular when taken to a party.

The 3rd time I made it I realised that Marmite would also provide glutamate without the odd looking green/black flecks in the hummus and with more flavour. Hence my current recipe.

By Andrew Hardwick.
Distributable under GPL freeware licence.
Written 2008/5/2 to 2008/5/9.
Updated 2008/6/24, 2009/4/14, 2019/7/9, 2019/12/4, 2020/8/17 & 2023/12/10.
Typo correction 2024/7/13.
Other recipes by Duramecho.
Available on-line at http://duramecho.com.