(Bolding mine)
Yes. I’ve done this - with a bit of tinned or fresh tomato, it needs a little paste to boost the flavour, but the tomatos prvide all the required juice.
Or you could get an aluminum ice cube tray, blorp the tahini in, freeze it. Get it good and frozen, then run the base of the tray under scorchingly hot water for a few seconds, pop out the tahini cubes and store in a zippy bag in the freezer. Take a cube out in the morning that you want to make hummuss, or nuke until melted. No separation issues. You can do this with pretty much anything that isn’t destroyed by freezing.
My hummus-making anecdote: Threw the chickpeas and garlic cloves into the food processor, blended the hell out of it. Did all the other things, got pretty good hummus. Enjoyed a big dab on a bagel, found a chickpea that somehow escaped the food processor intact in that particular dollop. Thought “what the hell, no biggie” and bit down.
It wasn’t a chickpea, it was an intact raw garlic clove.
:o
I use the juice of a whole lemon (preferably a Meyer). I also thoroughly drain the garbanzo beans. Due to a few incidents similar to Qadgop’s, the raw garlic is always chopped a bit first.
With the tahini, I find that I have to scrape the whole thing into my mixer bowl and blend it smooth. Then once I return it to the can, it only needs to be rescraped from the bottom once in a while to keep it relatively homogeneous. Of course, if sesame oil delivered the same flavor, it would be worth considering. I saw some in the store the other day, and it looked like it would stay homogeneous.
I have started to cut out the green sprout from garlic, because of something I saw that suggested you do so, but is it really a problem?
To reduce the amount of oil and calories in the hummus, I pour off the oil from the separated tahini and save it for other uses, and use the solidified sesame paste in the hummus, adding other liquid to replace the oil content. This makes it an expensive proposition, though, as the price of a jar of tahini is $8 or $9 now. I see I can order it from Amazon more cheaply, which I may start to do since I go through a lot of it.
I like adding sun-dried tomatoes which I’ve reconstituted with a little boiling water to the ingredients before processing them. I worked at a place that added artichoke hearts before processing, which was also very good.
I don’t think sesame oil really has the same bitterness which is important in “traditional” hummus I think. But some people must prefer it that way. Sesame oil is good in Chinese food by the way.
As for the tahini, I used to just give it a shake and a stir. It wasn’t perfectly mixed when I used it, but I just tried to get a rough balance of the liquids and solids knowing it would be blended soon anyway.
Maybe I can pour a lot of the oil off like you said. Maybe I should get a centrifuge…
I actually prefer the texture of hummus from canned beans over dried and cooked. It seems I can never get the dried and cooked beans quite as soft and mashy as the canned ones.
If you want the flavor of fresh garlic without quite the “bite”, boil some water, run a skewer through your cloves, and dunk them for about 45 seconds.
I think cumin is essential to hummus, and especially so if you toast the cumin seeds a little before you grind them.
My favorite add-in is a handful of kalamata olives. Looks dreadful, but very tasty. More often I’ll just eat the olives alongside the hummus.
I made a batch of hummus yesterday, with the garbanzo flour.
No tahini, so I used peanut butter.
I had some garlic paste in the refrigerator (find that at an Indian/Pakistani market). I added a splash of seasoned rice vinegar.
I seasoned it with a little bit of this and that, and it wasn’t what I was looking for. So I stirred in a glug of sriracha.
What a GOOD BATCH!
~VOW
I like to keep it simple. Garbanzo beans, oil, garlic, with maybe a binder (probably peanut butter, as I never have tahini.) I hate when it gets sour, like most commercial preparations.
I’m not a fan of grocery store hummus; it’s always too bland and too finely blended. I did enjoy it when the local Whole Foods started making hummus pizzas one Saturday though. 
It was surprisingly good, especially since the cooking process didn’t dry out the hummus too much.
How exactly, did they make it before they had food processors?
Just curious.
Mortar and pestle, maybe? Just bashing the ingredients between two rocks would probably get the job done too.
Lemon, man, lemon!
Well, I don’t know about them, but I used a metal potato masher. Worked fine.
I also find – thanks to Moosewood, I think – that a dash of soy sauce really brings everything together better than plain salt.
Now I’ve tried the recipe with everything the same except that I used black beans. It’s nice, though I think something else in the profile should be shifted. For one thing, it has much more of a ‘beany’ taste than the garbanzo beans. Also, the beans seem to add their own texture, which I need to explore further.
Often I make hummus for social gatherings. I make a white-and-wheat checked pull-apart bread bowl to hold the dip and top it off with a fine coating of chilli powder and parsley flakes for color. The grey sludge you get with black beans is delicious, but wouldn’t look right in the bread bowl. And how would you decorate it except with maybe diced white onion?
Awesome cookbook, isn’t it!
The hummus I referenced in Post #29 is GONE.
I better get out the chickpea flour!
~VOW