Hummus - Recipe

RECIPE VERDICT:  This recipe has built in flexibility, so every time you make it, it gets better.

I was so overwhelmingly disappointed with hummus recipes online.  They always end up disappointing, but what was I to do?  All I had to go off of is the recipes I find.  They usually don't offer much in the way of variation.  Sometimes the comment section provides different tips, but alas, even those proved fruitless. I even read a comment where someone was upset that their hummus didn't taste like store-bought.  What?????!?!?!?  Store-bought hummus is not the goal!  Store-bought hummus is the hummus you buy because you can't find real hummus.  It's the frozen pizza of hummus.  You don't make pizza at home and then lament when it isn't as good as frozen.  That's crazy.

I was in search of restaurant style hummus or home style hummus (if your home happened to be in the Middle East).  I had given up hope....until...I was in home of a female chef from Israel and saw how she made it.  The secret?  Lots of tahini!  I've only found recipes that have such a minuscule amount of tahini.  I've read comments where people have stated that they put in less tahini, because it overpowered the hummus.  Bah!!!  Bah, I say!!!  Tahini is delicious.  It is the ingredient that makes hummus so addictive.  It is also one of the more expensive ingredients and therefore often omitted from store bought products.

In any case, this chef was making hummus.  She tasted it and decided it needed a little more tahini and proceeded to dump half a large jar of tahini into a large batch of hummus.  The result was undeniable.  I didn't get to see the first part of the recipe, so I don't know if she used canned or fresh garbanzo beans, but I did see everything else that went into it.  I came up with my smaller batch canned version.

This was a thick batch.  Subsequent batches were thinner and to my liking.

 Ingredients:

1 can garbanzo beans and ALL of the liquid in the can (that's right....ALL!)
1 medium sized clove of garlic (I love garlic and honestly, this is all you need)
The juice of one lemon (I don't want lemony hummus.  One is more than enough.  I even might try without.)
A ton of tahini
Olive oil
More olive oil and paprika on top
Sour salt (citric acid)  I don't have this, but the chef used it.  I think it is fine without it.

Put it all in a medium sized food processor and voila.

I prefer my hummus thin.  That's the first hummus I tried and has always been my favorite.  Most recipes call for the a small amount of liquid from the garbanzo bean can.  Nope, put it all in.

For a recipe this size, online recipes call for 1/3 cup tahini.  While I learned from the chef not to measure, I would say that I put about 1 cup of tahini per batch and would feel comfortable adding more.  Tahini is delicious by itself.  I don't mind if a little garbanzo bean gets mixed in with it.  I don't recommend tahini that comes in a can.  It can be notoriously hard to mix once separated and the canned variety separates a lot.  Sometimes, that's all you can find though.  You make do with what you get.

I find that olive oil tastes good by itself.  Using that logic, I drizzle a lot of olive oil into the food processor while blending.  I just make sure that the hummus is a smooth consistency and forms the equivalent of soft peaks.

Paymon's

I love falafel, but I never get to have it.  Greg always chants, "Falafel is awful."  Partly because he likes the rhyme, partly because he knows it annoys me, and partly because he hates falafel.  I was super excited when he suggested Paymon's for lunch.  He tends to avoid Mediterranean restaurants, because he always says, "Isn't that whole area a little iffy?"  Paymon's serves what I think of as non-threatening food from a foreign country.  Nothing is very strange, falafel is perhaps one of their stranger things on the menu.  Everything is amazingly overpriced.

Greg had the pastitsio, which is basically bland Greek lasagna, something that I could never get excited about.  I had the falafel which had really large patties.  I prefer my patties smaller and crispier.  The fries were just superb though.  I could go to Paymon's for just the fries with their strange mustard like fry sauce.

The thing that pissed me off though is when we ordered a pot of tea.  They have a great selection of tea to order from, but when we asked if we could split a pot of overpriced tea, we were informed that it wasn't allowed.  Really?  Everyone has to get their own POT of tea...not a glass, a pot.  You can't split a pot of tea.  What a joke of a restaurant showing that they really just care about ways to make money!

Paymon's, by the way, is the restaurant that gets called in about on KNPR constantly.  Whenever they have a food critic on, people call in and rave about Paymon's.  It got the point that people at KNPR usually mention that they will not be taking calls about Paymon's and that Paymon's is just all right of a restaurant.  The people that called in about Paymon's apparently were over-enthusiastic employees.