hummus à la karen and hollis easter

from hollis, of course

(her oral recipe, which I've [Hollis has] adapted)

  • 1 can chickpeas, rinsed
  • a splash of olive oil
  • fresh black pepper
  • 7-15 cloves garlic, crushed and then minced
  • lemon juice
  • cumin powder in sufficiency
  • hot sauce, enough
  • hot water to thin to desired consistency

Put all of the above in a blender, handblender bowl, or whatever. Blend. Eat. Good.

Apparently there's tahini in there too, but Hollis won't say how much. He does say that you can use peanut butter instead of tahini (better use organic, then!), and that you should use a whole head of garlic if you do. Um ... wow.

commentary:

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 10:46:48AM -0400, Nori Heikkinen wrote:
> how much tahini?

A difficult question. As with most things I cook, this one isn't measured with cups and spoons and a beam balance, but instead with eye, hand, and intuition. Cooking's a sort of meditation for me, and so the "spirit of the thing" has to reveal itself. How much tahini to use depends on what this batch of hummus wants to be.

In general, though, for a can of chickpeas (rinse them well!) I use somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 C of either tahini or peanut butter.

> > It's fine with peanut butter as a substitution (especially when you
> > use my preferred method: close to a full head of garlic). You should
> > try it!
>
> woah.

Yep. It's good. My friend and teacher Susie tells me of a Lebanese hummus she once had that was like my recipe of hummus, except that there were no chickpeas. An all-garlic hummus.

As an aside, I specified that you crush the garlic before mincing it. Bash it with the side of your knife, and then chop it--don't bother with a garlic press. The crushing breaks the cell membranes of the garlic and makes it release its flavor better. Crushed garlic is typically slightly milder, a bit fuller in flavor, and has a nicer texture than does uncrushed garlic.

> pb? really??

Absolutely. I made Greek chicken pitza last night (my own recipe, hacked from something I had at Sinbad's restaurant in Rochester), and I used hummus with pb as the sauce base. It's really good. Slightly different, but I wouldn't even say that it's an inferior product to tahini-based hummus; just different.

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