So, hummus has been on the menu recently. I read a recipe on one of those recipe sites which let people make comments, and someone said that her mother in law said that the garbanzo’s aught to be peeled. Well, I like picking, so I examined the garbanzos and found that they do have easily remove skins. So, me and my daughter work on peeling them and my two year old works on getting the peels out of the bowl, and then I make up the best hummus we have had. I made my own tahini after failing to find in in any local market for over a month, by roasting the sesame seeds in the big iron skillet and then grinding them in the blender.
This weekend we also had a tapenade and have plans to try baba ganouche. Another of our recent favorites has been meet paste. We buy lunch meat ends from the local supermarket, chop them up and add mayo, celery, onion, garlic, and cheese to form a meat paste akin to ham salad. I’m thinking of putting together a paste based menu for a party.
What is your favorite type of paste to eat? Do you make your own hummus, if so, do you peel the canned garbanzos? Does anyone make their hummus using fresh garbanzos? If so how?
I don’t do that kind of recipes, but Mom has peeled the garbanzos for ages. She claims that way she doesn’t get gas from them.
PS: isn’t “chick peas” the same as Spanish “garbanzos”? Do you guys use garbanzos for a specific variety or something, like you do with “salsa”?
Well to be quite honest, dried and then soaked garbanzos probably should be peeled. If you get them from the can, however, they are a hodge podge… some have been naturally husked and denatured by their long boil. The remaining is just fiber, it’s good for you. Quite a difference from dried and canned.
Garbanzo is the Spanish name for chick pea, and I use it because it is what the cans are labeled with. Also, chick pea is what people who think of them as live stock feed tend to call them and garbanzo is what people who eat them tend to call them. I wonder if they are called chick peas because the look like little chicks.
Sometime vegetarian, now perhaps 20 % omnivore here. Ready-made hummus only recently became available in Finland (like within the last nine months), and I was totally disappointed with just about everything about it, since I’ve been making my own for many years with a compact-style food processor.
I use dried garbanzos/chick peas almost exclusively. Sometimes canned, if I’m in extreme hurry, but they’re often either too hard, too small or too soft, or have an unpleasant side flavour of metal or paper. And I never bother with peeling – once the chickpeas are soaked, boiled and smashed, the peels will be soaked, boiled and smashed as well. Life’s too short to peel chickpeas, especially if someone asks me to make enough to feed crowds (one of the cons of being the local hummus goddess). In fact, the only pulse I feel is necessary to peel is the fava bean, which has skin made from kevlar and shark leather.
Now, hummus varieties. One midsummer’s eve when the health food shop had closed for three days and tahini couldn’t be had for love and money, I made up sundried tomato and cashew nut hummus. At the moment there’s a bowl of roast garlic and fig hummus in the fridge, and I look forward to testing many more flavour combinations. Other nuts to try include walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds, so don’t get discouraged if you can’t find tahini.
Other pastes to try: Pulses are fun to play with – navy beans and fava beans are supposed to be good for hummus-like concoctions too. My new love is muhammara, a bell pepper, walnut and pomegranate paste. More fiddly to make than hummus, and it took me some detective work to get hold of pomegranate molasses, but with a lovely bittersweet fruit flavour. Recipe here: http://chocolateandzucchini.com/archives/2007/12/muhammara.php
Natural yoghurt, strained until it has the same consistency as cream cheese, is a good base for pastes as well.
Liver, liver, LIVER! A nice pig liver pâté I.E. liverwurst or Braunschweiger, which surprisingly doesn’t really have that much liver in it. Or more livery, a nice chicken liver pâté?
I’ll be in my [del]bunk[/del] fridge.