Lunch today. Green lentils, salmon and herb relish with capers that my partner prepared on Sunday to make this quick enough to have as lunch. Salmon leftovers will be used in a salad for lunch tomorrow. We’re trying hard to plan our meals better so we can have our main meal during lunchtime. The effort is made so that I don’t have to wait around in the evenings until my partner is done meeting his US colleagues… because it inevitably leads to me snacking whatever I can find for a couple hours.
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That looks lovely
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Realise I didn’t post any photos of my weekend of cooking. Got a brisket and cooked it low and slow (for about 14 hours). Also made some tasty burnt ends.
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The secrets to good hummus:
- Easy on the garlic
- blend the garlic in lemon juice and let it sit for 5 mins to ‘cook’ out the bad aftertaste.
- boil the chickpeas in water with some bicarb for 10-20mins. Alkaline softens the shells.
- in addition to tahini, use cheap olive oil to loosen the mix a bit.
I’ve been making burgers to celebrate the good weather.
Patty: beef, onion, garlic, egg, salt, pepper, maple syrup, breadcrumbs, maple wood smoke.
Burger: (patty+cheese)*2 on waffle with bacon, maple syrup, mayo, frosties (cereal).
Mini hash browns with bacon and cheese.
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So much hummus. (So many carrot sticks.)
I just made a new batch with 1/2 tsp of Smoked Paprika. I’d been using a couple of pinches of paprika before, but this amount gave it a really lovely (but still mild) flavour. I might try that with slightly more next time, but liked it enough to put half of it in a container before continuing…
Previously I was adding basil pesto, which I can highly recommend. (I want to try this with fresh basil leaves, next time.)
My intended flavour this time was olive. I added something like 8-10 pitted black olives to the remaining mixture, which made for a moderately strong flavour. I tried it with half that to begin with, and decided I wanted more (I like olives).
I’m also planning to try pumpkin the next time I buy one, and to double-down on the carrots with a carrot-flavoured batch as well.
For reference, I’m starting from a cup of dried chickpeas, soaked overnight, cooked (4.5 cups of water, bring to boil, simmer on low for 45 mins), drained and rinsed.
Then in the food processor:
- cooked chickpeas
- 2/3 cup of water
- 3 tbsp tahini
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp crushed garlic
- 1 tsp salt
I can’t specifically taste the garlic at that amount, but suspect if I doubled it to 1 tsp it would then be quite an obvious flavour. YMMV, and at this point I’m not trying to work out the perfect amount, so that’s all I can say.
I’m using hulled tahini, and I think unhulled may make for a thicker mixture (based on a batch with my previous jar of tahini – but maybe the contents of that jar had just thickened up over time… not really sure). At any rate, I’m ending up with a pretty thick hummus, so if you like it smoother and creamier then I would start by blending about half the chickpeas and then add more until you get the consistency you want. (Leftover chickpeas for dinner!)
(The last time I cooked too many chickpeas I then cooked some pearl cous cous, added the chickpeas, and mixed in some diced tomatoes. That was delicious.)
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I just add more water or olive oil if the mix is too thick. Also I seem to remember the variant I picked up from an Ottolenghi cookbook uses baking soda to make it a bit fluffy.
I really need to make a batch.
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Having real trouble with this “too much garlic” idea, speaking as someone who has made and eaten home-pickled garlic segments. But I believe you.
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At a guess, I’d dropped in about 1 tbsp of crushed garlic in the batch I’d made before the one I liked, and YMMV but that was a lot. I didn’t throw it out (it wasn’t inedible, and I don’t like to waste things), but that batch lasted me a long time…
Yeah, that’s a lot of garlic.
There is a technique involving mixing your smooshed garlic+salt paste and the lemon juice into your ‘minimum offer’ amount of tahini. That stiffens up surprisingly. When it slackens again, then add it to the chickpea mush in the processor. After that, adjustment with lemon, oo, and straight tahini can be done. Not with garlic, though: Roger, hesitant though I am to scrape away at the foundations of a chap’s most dearly held beliefs, there is such a thing as over-garlicked hummus and it isn’t all that nice.
ETA: there is also the ‘pinch the skin off every single bleedin’ chickpea’ method. Yes, I’ve done it - once -and found the result unpleasantly over-smooth. They obviously don’t do that at the local restaurant that does hummus of the gorgeously smooth persuasion.
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If that’s how hulled tahini is made, I don’t want that job!
I used to blanch and remove the skins from almonds when making almond milk because every recipe I’d seen said to remove the skins. I got pretty efficient at it with a little three-bowl production line, and so it was just part of the routine and it didn’t bother me; but finally one day I set myself up to make two batches together and left the skins on for one batch, so that I could compare them side by side. They looked and tasted identical.
The sole discernable difference was the whether the left-over almond meal contained little bits of almond skin, which might make a difference if you were going to use it in other cooking.
Oooh. And to bring that full-circle, I just read a comment:
I also make hummus from my almond pulp instead of drying it… lemon, garlic, olive oil, tahini, salt, pepper cumin. Mix together using a recipe for hummus. Just replace the chickpeas with almond pulp.
I definitely need to try that.
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I have no idea how They get the hulls off sesame seeds; but with tahini it’s mainly a taste thing, with the unhulled version having a stronger flavour as well as a slightly darker colour and very marginally coarser texture.
With the boiled chickpeas, it’s purely textural and, while I can’t recommend it much as a job, it has to be a darn sight easier than skinning sesame seeds (‘Unclothe, Sesame’?).
Interesting about the almond pulp.
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Tried it. A bit weird. It’s a perfectly edible dip, but certainly not as good (at least based on this attempt).
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Noteworthy: That’s much better with toast than with carrot sticks.
The texture with the almond pulp is relatively chewy compared to normal hummus, and that was a big part of the reason why I wasn’t very taken by it. A ton of processing might smooth it out more, but I’m not sure how much. However – eat it with something like toast which has a substantially coarser texture than the almond pulp, and the almond texture is completely masked. At least I assume that’s what’s happening, and not something else particular to bread/toast. In any case, I’m finding that combination works really well, to the point where I think I’d happily make it again in future purely for toast.
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Almost anything tastes better on toast…
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That sounds like a challenge…
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I made a large batch pf hummus with just barely enough garlic, probably too much tahini, cumin, sumach, paprika niora, lemon juice and olive oil. Will find out tomorrow if it is good. Needs a few hours….
Rest of the chickpeas will be made into falafel tomorrow.
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Dear whatevers, you really should know better than to say that, here.
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