Homemade Hummus: Part II

I’ve been making hummus for a couple of years and as I’ve been honing my skills, I’ve learned a few tricks to overcome obstacles that can make this process annoying, time-consuming and on occasion mind-numbingly boring. The obstacles I’m referring to are as follows:

I routinely forget to soak chick peas overnight. 

I eat a lot of hummus and don’t enjoy cleaning up garlic skin and gooey tahini each time I want a snack. 

Hovering over my kitchen sink to remove even one more chick pea husk places me in imminent danger of losing my mind.

Just a few issues, nothing major. With a little practice and experimentation, I’ve identified dilemmas, found solutions and  made making hummus an easy part of my meal plan.

(Side note: It’s possible that not all of you are excited by the notion of perusing an article detailing solutions specific to hummus preparation. That’s okay. For you, I have included at the end of this post a moderately amusing image of a packaged food item I recently discovered, photographed and from which I have removed an apostrophe.)

1. Soak in bulk

Dried beans are superior to canned beans in terms of cost, taste, health, and possibly the environment…I haven’t really looked into that one, but hey, it seems like it could be true. If anyone knows about that, please share! But, soaking them is a pain. The best I can do with this issue is reduce soaking frequency by double bagging it, meaning I soak two 1 lb. bags of chick peas overnight. I wake up to roughly 14 cups or 9.33 cans or enough chick peas for seven batches of hummus.

{six weeks of chick peas}

2. Boil with Baking Soda

The beans, even after boiling, were often grittier than I’d like. It seemed the only way to get a smooth texture was to remove the husks. That is a terrible use of time. And it’s boring and tedious. And I hate it. When I hate something, I complain about it. Sometimes on this blog and sometimes to my husband (in this case, both.) My husband grew to hate what I hated and took action by researching the issue. Enter the game changer: baking soda. Boil the chick peas for an hour with ~1 tbsp of baking soda and they are completely and utterly perfect, husks and all.

{Gone are the days of salting chick peas for added grip to aid weary hands in painstakingly removing husks.}

3. Time your tahini

Lastly, I get a fabulously smooth texture by first processing my tahini and lemon juice together until it gets a whipped airy consistency. Then I go ahead and add everything else, with the chick peas entering the mix last. To see just how much I’ve learned, you can read my first post about hummus here, so naïve. Well, that’s it. These three tips have made my life easier and hopefully they’ll help you too.

And, of course, here’s that picture I promised.

Happy weekend.