Make better Hummus Today!

I sat on my dried beans high horse for YEARS - until I had a kid. At which point I fell off that horse, landed right into a can of chickpeas, and truly haven't soaked a bean since.

Hummus as a dish. Garnished lovingly with cooked whole chickpeas in their broth, tahina, spices and olive oil

I am not the first person to tell you that canned goods are your friend, especially if you are someone trying to get your Nap Snack on. I’m only saying this because technically making hummus from dried chickpeas, (specifically the minuscule ones from Bulgaria - a story for another time), is the preferred and superior method. And up until very recently I was exclusively team ‘dry bean’. That is until I decided anything that involves 36 hours of pre-planning (yes, that is how long I recommend you soak your dried chickpeas for), just wasn’t going to cut it in a pinch. I needed solutions, people! Cut to canned chickpeas as the answer to all of my hummus related problems. Well, maybe not all of them...

Sidebar: I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that hummus is arguably one of the world’s most politically charged dishes. It is part of a colonial food saga in which the tradition of eating mashed up chickpeas (thought to have originated in Egypt in the 13th century), became a staple of the Levant and the Arab world, of Jewish Arab culture, and then more recently of yoga instructors and baby carrots alike. There are many folks who do this subject justice and I am hoping to get into the complicated nature of culinary gatekeeping and socio-political food history more thoroughly in a forthcoming newsletter.

For today, I am going to cover the, “Why I love to eat, make, and share good hummus with others.”

The WHY I love to eat it is probably obvious to my readers from Israel and other hummus loving countries, so bear with me here. To everyone else, it is beloved because it is a meal in a bowl, and it deserves respect. I can’t emphasize this enough - hummus is not a dip, it’s a meal.

I make it instead of buy it because I find supermarket hummus to be grainy, bland, and devoid of personality, if I’m being nice. How one eats their hummus can be a very personal thing. I like it to be heavy on the tahina, creamy like a cloud, not too garlicky, and very lemony in all the right places. I like to share it with others because if you’ve never actually eaten good hummus, how else would you know that it is best served warm and doused in olive oil?

What follows is a quick dupe and the key to having excellent quality hummus in your life without having to remember to soak a single bean like some kind of food-craving psychic. It’s giving Hummus carte blanche.