When I moved from the UK to Switzerland a few years back, it became almost impossible to source hummus. In the UK, any supermarket will sell it to you, and it's cheap and usually decent. In Switzerland, it's treated as an exotic foodstuff and can only be obtained at absurd prices in health food shops - or worse, put together all wrong. Katzenfabrik and I once bought some hummus that was a kind of whiteish mass tasting faintly of curry powder.
Because of this, I have had plenty of incentive to figure out how to make the stuff myself. I sometimes did this in the UK, and the results were reasonable, but inconsistent, and it was a lot of fuss. What I really needed was a quick recipe with consistently good results. What follows is this recipe.
Ingredients
- One 400 ml tin of chickpeas
- A lemon
- A jar of tahini
- Two cloves of garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
- Some water
Equipment
- A decent food processor
- A mixing bowl
- Chopping board, knife, spoons, sieve and sink
I can't give exact quantities for all of the ingredients above because in a lot of cases it comes down to adding ingredients gradually until something happens - you'll see, it's straightforward.
Recipe
- Drain and rinse the chickpeas and put them into the food processor.
- Add some water, about enough to cover the chickpeas halfway.
- Pulse the food processor. It will blend some of the chickpeas and then stop. Add some water and try again. There will be a tipping point where there's just enough liquid for the blades to produce suction, at which point all of the chickpeas will blend nicely.
- At this point, the blended chickpeas will look too runny. Don't worry, this will be fixed.
- Add the juice of half the lemon and the chopped garlic and blend in.
- Pour out the mixture into the mixing bowl.
- Add three tablespoons of tahini and stir in with a spoon.
- Note with amazement as two liquids combine to form a mixture that's thicker and lighter than either of them.
- Add more tahini until the mixture starts being stiff enough to partly keep its shape. (Or to taste.)
- If the hummus tastes bland, add more lemon juice and/or tahini.