The Last Hummus Recipe You Will Ever Need

Relatively recently, my hummus game has finally reached critical mass.  About eight or nine years ago in Haifa, a fellow postdoc talked about eating lots of hummus, for the folic acid.  Seemed positive to me and I began trying my hand at making it myself.  As much as I tried, year after year, I always struggled with aspects such as (1) it's messy, (2) I would tire of making it and have left over Tahini for months, (3) Tahini is expensive (4) Tahini settles and there just isn't an easy way to redistribute it, (5) I would quit paying attention and burn chickpeas while boiling them on the stove, (6) I never kept track of the quantities of 'sauce' (tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic) or chickpeas leading to blending results all over the map.

Well, these issues have all been taken care of, and I'm pleased to share the result!

I'm grateful to now have several kitchen tools that I didn't have in Haifa and make this process a breeze, providing 8 servings of hummus that I keep in the refrigerator.

Kitchen tools:

• 6 quart Instant Pot pressure cooker

• 1 cup measuring cup

• Vitamix blender

• Escali 5kg digital scale

• 6-cup containers/bags for storing 900g cooked chickpeas apiece

• 8x ~2 cup tupperwares to store hummus from one batch.

• A scoop conducive for transferring from Vitamix to tupperware

Ingredients:

• 900g pressure cooked chickpeas - they say dried is healthier than canned, and we get 25 lb bags from Palouse for $60.  Pressure cook 6 cups of dried chickpeas + 12 cups of water makes about 3x 900g batches... store unused 900g batches in freezer.  Begin thawing a batch in fridge day before making hummus, leave on counter day of.  Will still blend if cold or semi-frozen.  (Admittedly, warm hummus is the best but having cheap, cooked chickpeas in the freezer ready to go is also great!)

• 1.3 cups olive oil - buy it by the gallon

• 200g sesame seeds - much easier to use that Tahini, hence the Vitamix is very helpful here.  Less than $6/lb is doable.

• 8g salt

• 55g garlic - endure the pain of peeling cloves, or buy the preminced.

• 1 cup water

• 1 cup lemon juice - was using $38/3L lemon juice but recently switched to $12/3L

The Process:

Add the 'sauce' ingredients (oil, sesame seeds, salt, garlic, water, and lemon juice) to the Vitamix and blend, at high speed, until homogeneous.  Adding all 900g of your cooked chickpeas to this sauce would be too much for the Vitamix to handle, so, remove half the sauce and blend half the chickpeas for one 'demibatch' of hummus that will dispense into 4 containers.  Have the tare of your Vitamix container ready (ours is 908 grams), and use the scale to remove exactly half the sauce, or your consistency will change between your first and second demibatch.  (Usually we make about 1.05 kg of sauce, by the way.)  After removing half the sauce and adding the chickpeas, you're ready to blend!  I find these sauce:chickpea ratios enable a blend without having to manually stir the mix around in between blends.  Also, don't try going to 11 on the Vitamix, it will get mad and might even 'lock you out' for 30 minutes due to overheating.  I start slow, at 1 or 2, to coarsely chop all the chickpeas, then gradually go to higher speeds, topping out around 5.  It only takes a minute or two.  Scoop into four Tupperwares, add the set-aside ingredients, repeat, and enjoy!

You could add or subtract garlic, salt, or lemon juice, but these are healthy amounts that you are definitely going to taste.  If you subtract lemon juice, I would make sure to conserve the total water-based volume of 2 cups to maintain consistency.