Hurray for Hummus

Middle Eastern is hardly at the top of the list of ethnic cuisines that have worked their way into mainstream America. But the Middle East has contributed one food that most every American has at least tried: hummus.

Hummus is a thick Middle Eastern sauce or dip of pureed or mashed chickpeas flavored with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil or sesame-seed paste (tahini). When tahini is used, it technically becomes hummus bi tahini.

Though it can be made into a hot sauce to accompany ground lamb, hummus is typically served cold with wedges of pita bread. It’s light, it’s healthy, and it’s a great dip for any summer party.

Paula Wolfert, an expert on cooking of the Mediterranean, including many countries of the Middle East, said that the word hummus, means “chickpeas” in Arabic

“In Lebanon, if you said, ‘I want some hummus,’ they’d hand you a bag of chickpeas,” she said.

And tahini is not even used in some countries. “I lived in Morocco for seven years, and never had hummus with tahini in it,” said Wolfert, who included a recipe for hummus in The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (HarperCollins, 1994).

Hummus bi zeit is hummus with olive oil and no tahini. And in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, cooks make essentially a hummus without chickpeas, a sauce of tahini, lemon juice and garlic called tarator that’s served with fish.

Still, chickpea hummus with tahini is the most popular throughout the Middle East, and that’s also true of this country.

Hummus in U.S. stores, though, is not always traditional. As often as not, it may have extra ingredients, such as chiles, olives or roasted red peppers, that Wolfert has never seen in the Middle East.

“You could say it’s evolving,” Wolfert said.

In her perfect world, hummus is made from chickpeas cooked from scratch, and preferably the smaller varieties sold in Middle Eastern markets, but they are hard to find in our area.

“The smaller ones, grown in drier areas, are known for their better flavor and texture,” she said. “U.S. supermarkets have bigger ones, which are still OK.”

She said that the difference between typical canned and freshly cooked chickpeas is “like the difference between black and white and Technicolor.”

“To me, it loses something in the canning,” she said. “But if you can find a great can of cooked chickpeas, you’re doing good.”

She also said that a slow cooker (such as a Crock Pot) does a great job of cooking chickpeas with little effort. But cooking them on the stove works fine, too. The aim, she said, is to cook the chickpeas slowly for a long time until they are very soft.

In eastern Mediterranean countries, cooks will even remove the skins of the chickpeas.

“In Turkey, women take a bottle or rolling pin and roll soaked chickpeas on a cloth, and the skins just pop off,” Wolfert said.

The skins also can be removed after cooking. In Morocco, cooks will gently massage the cooked chickpeas in cold water until the skins rub off and rise to the surface. American cooks can remove the skins by running the chickpeas though a sieve or a food mill.

“Without the skins, the hummus is so much lighter, in color and texture.” Wolfert said.

Wolfert also notes that all tahinis are not alike, and that hummus fans should taste different tahinis to find the one they like best.

Once the chickpeas are cooked and the other ingredients are chosen, preparing hummus is simply a matter of combining them. For convenience, this can be done in a blender or food processor. Many recipes call for dumping in all the ingredients at the same time, but Wolfert believes that the flavors blend better when the tahini, lemon juice and garlic are combined first, and then mixed with the chickpeas.

The proportion of chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice and garlic can be varied to personal taste. But most recipes will use equal amounts of lemon juice and tahini, a much larger amount of chickpeas, and small amounts of garlic and salt. For garnish, hummus typically gets a drizzle of olive oil and often a sprinkle of hot paprika, ground red pepper or ground cumin.

– Michael Hastings
Media General News Service
Hastings is food editor for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina