Hummous and Tahini

One spring day, I decided I wanted some hummous. I had canned and dry garbanzo beans, and the usual contents of my pantry. I did not, however, have tahini. I buy tahini, and then I don't use it and it goes bad after a few months, even in the Refrigerator of Immortality.

I did, however, have sesame seeds. I knew that tahini was made from sesame seeds. After a little investigating on the web (google is your friend), I made tahini.

Tahini

In a coffee grinder, preferably dedicated to spices, grind:

sesame seeds

Once ground fine, the seeds will have the texture of peanut butter. Thick peanut butter. You'll probably want the tahini thinner than that. There are a number of strategies you can employ at this point. I added:

olive oil

You can add other things to modify the flavor or consistency, including, but not limited to:

salt
sesame oil
peanut oil
water
lemon juice

After you make this, and get it out of the coffee grinder, you'll need to clean the coffee grinder. A paper towel works pretty well. You can run rice through the grinder if it's hard getting all the oil out.

Hummous

Because I wanted the hummous for lunch the day I made it, rather than a day or so in the future, I used canned garbanzo beans. Eden Organics has a line of no salt added beans. They are wonderful. In general, when using canned beans, you should pour off the water from the can, and rinse the beans. This helps reduce the amount of oligosaccharides that contribute to flatulence.

Some hummous recipes involve a potato masher; this is a lot of work. Some recipes call for the removal of the garbanzo bean skins, which is doable, but time-consuming and not, strictly speaking, necessary.

Food processor:

1 can garbanzo beans
tahini
olive, peanut or sesame oil
lemon juice

If you add slowly, and taste as you go, you can make adjustments to get this to be the proportions you like. Since that's what I did, I can't give you the ratios I used.

Once you have the base, you can start flavoring it. I added:

salt
chili powder
cumin
black pepper
white truffle oil

I did not use garlic, because I wanted a recipe I could serve a friend who is allergic to the entire garlic/onion family. The white truffle oil helps replace the garlic flavor.

Created April 30, 2006
Updated April 30, 2006