Hot Weather Cookery: Virtuous Hummus

Friends, there is a lot of crappy hummus out there in the world.

You have your Hippie Hummus, which is the consistency of indifferently mashed and lumpy potatoes, is usually dreadfully underseasoned and entirely unsalted, and in its bland muckiness also manages, by dint of the grit introduced by undercooking and lack of skinning the chickpeas, to be a character-building exercise.  One feels as if one must be accruing merit for the World To Come, at least nutritionally speaking, because normally only things that are very very good for you and eaten only for that reason are so entirely unpleasant to eat.

You also have what I refer to as your Protestant Supermarket Hummus, which, ever since hummus became trendy enough to be sold in grocery stores and subsequently a cheap appetizer and party-food staple, generally tastes reminiscent of wheatpaste mixed with spackle, finished with a zesty flourish of fake lemon juice made from recycled batteries, with a (ma)lingering mouthfeel that is partly greasy and partly fibrous. If it makes you feel like a dog with a mouthful of peanut butter, it is Protestant Supermarket Hummus.  (Yes, yes, I’m sure your personal supermarket has hummus that is utmost ambrosia.  Mine never have.  Not even the expensive ones.)

Protestant Supermarket Hummus also has its own archipelago of outliers, almost all of them also unpleasant.  This unfortunate constellation may be best characterized as Hummus Fusion Surprise!   Not unlike Protestant Supermarket Bagels, Protestant Supermarket Hummus, once taken over by massive factory production and aggressive marketing and the need to drive ever-bigger amounts of prepared foods-company profits, has been diversified — often quite dubiously — in directions that would be unrecognizable to native members of the culture in which the food in question originates.  Chipotle-scallion hummus is to hummus bi tahini, in other words, as the squishy-soft, green-dyed St. Patrick’s Day bagel is to the proud,  shiny, robustly-crusted bread rings on which the babes of the Ashkenazim have for centuries cut their milkteeth.

Once in a while you will also encounter Subtraction Hummus, which subtracts the ingredients that God clearly intended for hummus to have, namely tahini and olive oil, in favor of making the hummus “low fat”.  Instead, dubious substitutions are made, such as adding broth instead of tahini, and permitting only a miserly dribble of oil.  This is flat out wrong for two reasons.  First, it is entirely contrary to the whole point of hummus, which is to fill you up with cheap, easily digested, tasty complex carbohydrates and delicious nutritious plant oils, or, to put it another way, tahini and olive oil are things God clearly intended that hummus should have because any God I am willing to recognize doesn’t like it when poor people who have little other than chickpeas to eat end up starving to death for lack of calories and dietary fat, dammit.  Secondly, Subtraction Hummus is wrong because low-fat hummus, while it has potential industrial uses as a mildly abrasive polishing compound, is not something you really want in your actual mouth.

Some will also have encountered Sadistic Hummus.  This hummus, while made with reasonable quantities of both oil and tahini is nevertheless painful or even impossible to consume due to the quantity of extremely acrid (perhaps sprouting, or just rancid) garlic that is added to it.  This sub-par, sinus-scarifying, chrome-blistering garlic is present in Sadistic Hummus in quantities measured in the international unit of measure known as the “metric shitload.”  The effect is such that merely opening the lid of the bowl in which Sadistic Hummus has been stored constitutes chemical warfare.  I like garlic as much as the next girl, and possibly quite a bit more, given how much of the stuff (I peel a pint container of cloves every couple of weeks for convenience) I go through in the average fortnight, and I still say that garlic should be about love, not about getting hurt, and when the garlic makes you cry it is time to reconsider your relationship.  Trust me, hummus eating in its native habitat is not something one does to prove one’s masculinity, and adding more garlic than should be allowed by international treaty does not, in fact, make it “authentic.”  Only inedible.

Every once in a while, though, you are fortunate enough to encounter decent hummus.  Really good hummus is, at the very least, smooth, unctuous without being overwhelming, and savory without losing its satisfying creamy starchiness.  As a puree, it should be just at the edge of being liquid: one should not, unless it is fresh out of the refrigerator, be able to consider serving it with an ice-cream scoop.  Nor should it hold that shape as it comes to room temperature even if you did, as both olive oil and tahini are liquids at room temperature, and thus any good hummus will revert to its delightfully, reassuringly creamy paste texture when it comes to the temperature at which it should be served.  It will have a handshake acquaintance with good, fresh, sweet hardneck garlic, but the garlic should never have been allowed to manhandle the mixture.  There will be enough fresh, fruity, floral lemon juice that the lemon flavor flirts with you.  And of course there will be the nuttiness of sesame, from the tahini, and the peppery fruitiness of good olive oil, and a bit of salt to tie everything to the dependable ground of the chickpeas.

That is Decent Hummus.

Beyond and above decent hummus, there is Virtuous Hummus.  Virtuous Hummus is all of the above, only silkier and subtler and even better.  Decent Hummus will get eaten at parties, to some extent, but you will end up taking about half of it home.  Virtuous Hummus will be rapaciously devoured, and if there are leftovers, they’ll be minimal.  When people eat Decent Hummus they go “oh, yum, hummus,” and spoon some more onto their plates with a pleasantly anticipatory smile.  When people eat Virtuous Hummus, they go into raptures while simultaneously scooping it directly into their mouths:  “Oh my God this is so good” mumbled blissfully around a mouthful.

It is thus entirely defensible and reasonable to want to attain not only Decent but actually Virtuous Hummus.  Fortunately it is also not too difficult.  But as is often the case with such deceptively simple recipes as hummus, Virtuous Hummus is not so much something for which there is a recipe as something for which there is a general procedure and a handful of secrets, and after you have learned those, you simply have to experiment until your hummus makes that subtle, yet incandescent leap from decency to virtue.

The procedure:  Hummus is not rocket science.  It is a puree of cooked chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, some chickpea cooking water, and salt.  A food processor is key, unless you have arms of cold rolled steel, the patience of a bodhisattva, and a big mortar and pestle, which you probably don’t.   You can get the basics from any crap recipe for hummus: puree the chickpeas with liberal quantities of tahini, oil, and lemon juice, then add a judiciously small amount of garlic, some salt, and a little of the chickpea cooking water (or the liquid from canned chickpeas if you use them for convenience).  Plop it on a plate, drizzle it with a little more olive oil, grab your pita bread or your crudites, and dig in.

This, of course, tells you pretty much nothing.  Proportions are important, as you may guess.  My usual cooking method being “throw things into the pot until it looks right, then taste it, and if it isn’t right, throw more things into the pot until it is right,” I cannot give you exact quantities.  Nonetheless, the approximate proportions, to a drained 15-ounce tin of cooked chickpeas (I like the Goya brand, they are very good and always well cooked), are a third to a half-cup of tahini (depending on its thickness and oiliness) and an approximately equal volume of oil, the juice of one large very juicy lemon or two smaller stingier ones, and a single large (or two small) clove of raw garlic mashed to a paste with a quantity of kosher salt about the same volume as the garlic clove.  You may need to add a little of the cooking water depending on the degree to which the chickpeas were cooked, the thickness of the tahini, or indeed just personal taste regarding texture, and if you add it a tablespoon at a time and puree it in thoroughly before you add more, you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

You want, naturally, the best tahini you can lay hands on.  If it tastes bitter, even slightly, don’t use it: tahini goes rancid with appalling enthusiasm when it goes.  Likewise avoid anything that is produced by use of chemical solvents.  You want machine ground or milled tahini, something that should be indicated on the label, and it should have a nutty, slightly sweet, flavor reminiscent of other nut or seed butters.  My favorite brand currently is the Turkish Yörük brand tahini, which is dependably fine in both taste and texture.

You also want a good olive oil, assertive but not one of those crazy expensive private reserve sorts of olive oils that is really intended for a starring role on bread or pasta where you can taste it all by itself.  Use whatever you find tasty, but make sure it’s fresh.

Similarly, your garlic and your lemons need to be of good quality.  If your lemon juice comes out of a  bottle, it is neither Decent nor Virtuous and should be discarded as the impostor that it is.  This is doubly true if it comes out of a fruit of the genus Squeezyfruitus improbabilus, var. plasticus. Also, please be aware that friends don’t let friends use pre-minced or pre-crushed garlic that comes in jars.  It tastes of sulphur and hopelessness and has had all its vivacity surgically removed.  Seriously, it is just not that much work to peel and chop one or two cloves of garlic before you toss it in the food processor.  And although I would hope I wouldn’t need to say this, I am going to say it anyhow: no, garlic powder is notan appropriate substitute in this instance.

So that’s the procedure and some advice on ingredients.  Which leaves us with the secrets.

Perhaps the most important hummus secret I know, as once imparted to me by the octogenarian Lebanese grandmother of a friend, is first to skin your chickpeas.  “Only sluts,” she informed me seriously, “make hummus without skinning their chickpeas.”  I was skeptical at first, but having had ample opportunity to compare slutty hummus and what I suppose is chaste and morally upright hummus, I concur that it makes a big difference.

Skinning can only be done with cooked chickpeas.   If you cook your own chickpeas, cooking them until some of the skins start so slough off and float to the top of the pot on their own helps let you know that the chickpeas are getting cooked well enough for skinning them to be possible.  Ignore the nobly-meant but pig-ignorant advice of some cookbooks which will tell you to skin your chickpeas by putting them in a big bowl, filling the bowl with water, and rubbing your hands through the chickpeas until the skins all float off.  You’ll be at it all day and there will still be a lot of chickpeas sitting in their jackets laughing at you.  Alas, the truth is that chickpeas must be skinned one by one, by gently pinching them so that the pea itself slips out of its jacket.  This is a bit tedious but oh well, that’s life for you, so get a friend to help you, or else put on a movie or an audiobook and make the best of it.  (I note for the record that this is the reason that I always make large batches of hummus.  If I am going to go to all that trouble I may as well not have to go to all that trouble again anytime too soon.)

The benefit of skinning the chickpeas is that it vastly improves the texture, and some people believe the taste as well.  With the skins gone, there are no little gritty-feeling bits of that fibrous outer hull to impede the satiny smoothness of your hummus.  You can get an idea of the difference by simply eating two cooked chickpeas one after another, one skinned, and one not, and paying attention to the textures in your mouth.

This leads us to our second secret, also in pursuit of smoothness and texture, and that is to keep pureeing the mixture even after it appears to the eye to be thoroughly pureed.  As anyone who has ever made a bisque without aid of a chinois can tell you, the tongue can easily detect tiny solid particles in substances that seem, visually speaking, to be a completely smooth mixture.   The result of an insufficiently pureed hummus is a lumpy or gritty texture in the mouth, and sometimes also chalkiness resulting from little chunks of chickpea or little garlic landmines due to similarly insufficiently small bits thereof.  I typically puree the hummus until it is visually “done,” then puree it for another three minutes or so, and then taste-test it to make sure that it is smooth enough.

Related to this is the third secret: looser is better than thicker.  Hummus that is too thick won’t puree properly in a food processor because it can’t move around easily.  It won’t be drawn down to the blades by the vortex created by the turning blades, which means that only the hummus that starts out near the blades is likely to get adequate processing.  Remember that at room temperature, hummus should be approximately the consistency of cake frosting, soft and yielding but capable of forming peaks and valleys if you drag the back of a spoon over the top of it.  But also remember that in pursuing the optimal texture, tahini and olive oil pack more flavor and texture than the cooking water from the chickpeas can.  I generally prefer to correct the texture of hummus by adding more tahini or olive oil first, then tasting it, and only if I think I may be about to err on the side of imbalanced flavor or undue oiliness do I thin with cooking water.

Secret Four is, likewise, a texture secret, but it is one that is also a taste secret: hummus should be served either at room temperature or slightly warmed.  Both olive oil and tahini, when refrigerated, turn into solids.  Aggressive refrigeration, and a reluctance to let such a “convenience food” come up to room temperature when all one wanted was a quick dip into the hummus tub for a snack, is one of the reasons that Protestant Supermarket Hummus is often so terrible, tasting of so little and having such an unpleasantly mealy texture.  There are — and as much as I disdain most non-homemade hummus at this point, I have to confess this — some Protestant Supermarket Hummuses that aren’t all bad (Trader Joe’s makes one that I actually enjoy) as long as you let them warm up first.

This is crucial for any hummus, really, and the reasons are simple: fat carries flavor, and solid fats are less appealing than liquid or semi-liquid ones.  Heat makes most flavor compounds more available to us as tasters, as well, which is why cold soups, ice creams, and the like must be more aggressively sweetened, salted, or spiced to taste like they are as intensely flavored as hot or even merely room-temperature versions.  There is, in other words, a reason we don’t eat raw bacon, yet delight in smearing our toast in the bacon grease left on our breakfast plates, why that bit of fat at the rim of your steak tastes fantastic when it’s hot from the grill but tastes flatly awful the next day when it’s just been taken out of the fridge as leftovers, and why cold gravy is so miserably unfulfilling.

Secret Five is perhaps the most important one of all: let hummus be the simple food it is.  Made well, hummus is so satisfying and nourishing, comforting and at the same time complex enough that it feels like real food and not just pap.  It is suave and tasty enough, in its natural state, to be part of an elegant meal or to impress party guests.  You simply do not need to gild the gold, nor paint the proverbial lily.  If you must get fancy with your hummus, the traditional tarting-up methods are best: a slosh of olive oil, a sprinkling of sweet powdered paprika or fresh chopped parsley, or perhaps a scattering of hot just-toasted pine nuts.  Leave the crazy mix-ins to the ice cream people and the wasabi-kumquat-garam masala fusion crap to those with fewer functioning taste buds and less in the way of common sense.  Virtuous Hummus, or even merely Decent Hummus, is just fine on its own, and that, as they say, is virtue indeed.