I have posted in other threads, where I benefited from some Doper commentary, but I thought I’d solicit some more input on this subject, because I’m now making hummus at least twice a week these days.
When I cook, I’m attracted to principles rather than recipes. Recipes are something you build up from techniques. My recipe is based on gleaning the common underlying principles from multiple recipes I read online. In a discussion of technique it seems practical to give a recipe and then discuss the role of each ingredient.
1 Can garbanzo beans, drained (usually about 454 g listed)
70 g garbanzo beans brine
60 g Tahini
30 ml Lemon Juice
5 g salt
2 ml red pepper
10 ml Chipotle Hot Sauce
40 g Garlic (roasted)
5 g Garlic (raw)
60 ml Olive Oil
Garbanzo Beans: generally these come in 15 oz cans. The weight given includes the weight of the water they’re suspended in. But generally, one can per recipe. You could skin these. The core slips out of the skin with some pinching, but I’ve tried it a few times, and I don’t think it’s worth the extra trouble. Hell, the bean itself is an enjoyable and you might enjoy combining it with whatever other fats and spices you like.
Garbanzo Beans Brine: The water in the can of garbanzo beans is not that briney, but otherwise it’s a useful name for it. I preserve it to fill out the volume and mass of the final dip. Is it really better than the same volume of water? Only on the principle that something with some taste is better than no taste. Or, as Alton Brown puts it, “Does it bring any flavor to the party?” Well, sort of. So, why not?
Tahini: It’s ground sesame seed. It’s a lot like peanut butter, but more thinner, more bitter, and more trouble to work with because of a tendency for the heavier parts to float back to the bottom of the container. I use the most available brand Joya, and when I first open it I just dump and scrape it into a bowl and work it with a hand mixer into relative smoothness and scoop it back into the can. Subsequently, I always scrap the bottom and mix before using. It’s a flavor that adds a nutty but bitter counter to your other flavors.
Lemon Juice: The exact role of this ingredient is probably important. I haven’t tried leaving it out. I’ve only accidentally added to much, which I found highlighted its value – I thought, wow, this would have been great in slightly less concentration. Too much called attention to what just right contributed.
**Salt **- I use Kosher Salt, as I generally do for cooking. I don’t have any grand notion that it’s better than iodized salt, but I’ve come to think of Iodized Salt as something for adjustment while eating rather for cooking. Possibly the distinction is an artifact of culture than of whatever its taste would be independent of culture.
Red Pepper - People sprinkle this on pizza, which I’ve never noticed making a huge difference myself. The Sabra brand of Hummus has Red Pepper in every recipe, even if that isn’t the name of the flavor. Until I started working with Hummus, I couldn’t have told you what part of the flavor was Red Pepper. Now I see it as a kind of dial for spiciness. It’s hard to measure its impact by gram, but a 5 ml spoon will give a pretty good kick, and 10 ml is good for your friends who like it spicey.
Chipotle Hot Sauce - Now that I understand the role red pepper plays, I’m not sure I even need this, but generally I add Tobasco brand Chipotle sauce until it weighs out to 10 grams. This might be superfluous.
Roasted Garlic - For my tastes, I have yet to find a level of roasted garlic I find excessive. Roasting removes the sharpness and leaves behind a toasted taste that I like. A poster on The Straight Dope recommended this technique to me, but like other sources suggested putting garlic and olive oil in aluminum foil to bake at 350 F for 45 minutes. But if you’re trying to keep track of how many calories are going into the recipe, then you want to maximize how much of that oil you scrape into the final product. I used to use just a small pyrex bowl to roast the garlic with all the oil that I would then use for the hummus, with aluminum foil to cover. In light of Alton Brown’s advice that you are here creating an emulsion, I now use instead my pyrex measuring cup, which makes pouring easier. More about that below.
Raw Garlic - Roasted garlic is a lot more mellow than raw garlic. I think the two flavors stack nicely. I’ll use a whole bulb (about 40 grams) of garlic to roast except for three cloves which I keep raw. Alton Brown says to pre-chop or something-something. I don’t know what he’s talking about. But generally I do remove green sprouts in the middle of the garlic because I saw something once that said to do so. Wanna comment on whether this makes a difference? Anyway, the combo of roasted and raw garlic is fantastic, but most people seem to like less raw garlic than I do. We’re looking at 5 or so grams here, but you may prefer **less.
Olive Oil** - A third of the calories of hummus come from the olive oil. I don’t recommend skimping on it, but how terrible would a paste of pureed garbanzo and spices be? I do think, on the other hand, that the contribution of olive oil is significant. It seems to make the garlic more garlic-y and the red pepper more red-pepper-y. I don’t find it very flavorful in itself, but I have it in my head that it delivers other flavors to the palate. Can I get a witness? Also, it adds texture and makes it easier to whip up the mixture into a homogeneous mixture. According to Alton Brown, Hummus is an emulsion, and with that in mind I now pour this oil slowly into my food processor, after already removing the roasted pieces of garlic, but I don’t know if the creaminess that results is definitely the fact that I’ve made an olive oil version of mayonnaise, or if it’s just because I’ve just let the food processor whip the shit out of the beans.
In any case, I’ve broken the whole process down to the kind of component parts that I like to look at when I study a technique, and I invite further analysis.