DIY Hummus

I absolutely love hummus, even though I can only have a little bit before I react. However, I know that many folks may not be able to enjoy store-bought hummus due to issues with sesame or garlic, and so I wanted to put here a couple quick recipe 'bases' that you can use to enjoy some hummus for yourself!

Hummus (most basic recipe)

ingredients:

Dried chickpeas
olive oil
salt
lemon juice (or another sour liquid or semi-liquid)
(optional) any spices or seasonings of choice (chili powders and cumin are popular)
(optional) any aromatics (roasted peppers, roasted chiles, and/or garlic are popular and tasty)
(optional) tahini or other seed/nut based 'butter'

Directions:

1. Soak the chickpeas in water, overnight at minimum.  If you want a kind of different flavor, you can soak the chickpeas for a day or two and change out the water a couple times; they will start to ferment and develop a kind of pseudo-cheesy scent that can be pleasant with certain seasonings.
2. Decide if you want 'cooked' hummus or 'raw' hummus.  Either one will be fine, but the taste and texture of cooked is a bit less strong in taste and smoother in texture.  If you choose 'raw' hummus, a 12 hour soaking time total, at minimum, is helpful. 
3. For cooked hummus - drain and rinse the chickpeas, and cook in boiling water (not salt) for a few hours, until very soft.
4. For raw hummus - drain and rinse the chickpeas.
5. Put the chickpeas, salt, and any potential spices or aromatics (or tahini/seed butters) into a food processor (or large mortar and pestle, if you only have that) and blend/mash until chunky-smooth.  Then add in lemon juice and blend a little more. Then, while blending/mashing, slowly add in olive oil in a steady stream until the hummus is the desired texture.  Done!

Notes:

1. Why does this have no ingredient quantities?  Mostly because it's quite varied, how much you need, depending on what is added, if chickpeas are cooked, etc...  And how much or little is added in terms of spices and aromatics is highly dependent on taste.

2. Isn't it weird without tahini?  Nope.  Making hummus without tahini was actually a technique I got from an acquaintance from the Middle East. He mentioned that where he lived, tahini was really cheap, but olive oil less so, so using ONLY olive oil and no tahini became a bit of a status symbol.  I don't know how common this practice is, but it works quite well, even if tahini does make the hummus a bit smoother.

3. Is it safe to eat raw chickpeas?  Yeah, no problem for most folks. If you have any digestive issues, though, especially with any kind of raw foods or beans, however, you probably want to go for the cooked chickpeas rather than raw.

4. I can't use lemon juice; what can I use for a sour taste? This one is a bit tricky.  I have tried vinegar when I couldn't tolerate lemon and while it is 'okay,' it does have a distinct taste that is not necessarily a good match for chickpeas.  I have considered taking plain yogurt and draining it for a few hours, and using the liquid as a good souring agent. Haven't tried this yet, but I've used that as a lemon replacement before and it sometimes works.

Sweet Potato Cakes

I finally got these suckers to work!  I saw that the gluten free girl used yogurt to make an egg-free sweet potato latke, and that finally pinged a connection with the cashew cream I've been using, and this is the result. Inspired by her recipe.

Yummy!

Five Side Dishes I

Just a few side dishes for when you're feeling in a rut and need some new ideas.

Green Chile Sweet Potatoes

There are some new sweet potatoes at the Whole Foods this last week. I'm really not sure what they are, as the store just called them 'japanese sweet potato.' However, they have dark pink skins and white insides, which is unlike any japanese sweet potato I've seen - I usually see ones listed that way with red insides. I did a bit of digging (okay, I went to this one site) and it turns out these were Murasaki sweet potatoes.

These are awesome. Mild sweetness, lacks some of that dark, earthy kind of sweet flavor that you find in redder sweet potatoes, and which I rather dislike. So these were good.

But the kids hate 'em. So I started looking around my fridge and thought: I've got green chile and sweet potato - would that go together, maybe?

Socca - Grain Free chickpea-based flatbread

A really simple grain-free flatbread. I didn't even know these existed!

Salt, olive oil, chickpea flour, and water (and cumin, if you can have it). That's it for ingredients. I bet if you used another type of fat, that would work well too. I wonder if lard would be too much?  Hmmm.

If you can have chickpeas, I'm sure you could pretty easily make your own chickpea flour, too. This gentleman mentions that the chickpea flours used for this are rather coarse.

The recipe has a lot of pictures and technique to get this to work well. :-)
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/06/socca-enfin/


EDIT: 3/7/13
I forgot all about this for months and then recently rediscovered it. My fiddlings with recipes are now on the recipe page. :-)