Tuesday 28 January 2014

Home-Made Houmous*

Tonight I tried my hand at making humous. Or houmous. Or even humus. Or however you want to spell it. (Or pronounce it.) I had tried making this a couple of times before, from a recipe I found in the Lebanese cook book I mentioned in an earlier post, but wasn't completely satisfied with it. I tried tweaking and still wasn't sure what was wrong, but it just wasn't quite right. The final time I tried that recipe, my hand blender broke in the middle of blending the chickpeas. That was the only sign I needed that me and houmous-making were not a match made in Heaven, and I should give up.

Until today. Today, I decided to ditch the old recipe and usher in a new one. My recipe of choice came from Inspired Taste, and I was sold the minute I read that it was supposed to be better than store-bought houmous. Wow! Also, I now have a food processor, which I reasoned should make the process that much simpler. I was pretty pleased with the results, though I suspect a little more salt or maybe garlic wouldn't go amiss - but this is definitely closer to what I expect from my houmous.

The finished product!
My only concern was that the ingredients weren't blending together too well until I added the chickpeas. And sure enough, when I scraped the finished product out of the food processor bowl, I found some un-mixed tahini. I am pretty certain that this is due to my food processor not being one of the more expensive, snazzy ones, and it probably just couldn't cope with the very small quantity of food I was wanting it to process at first. This is a minor gripe, but probably worth bearing in mind if you are going to attempt this one.

I used my houmous as a baked sweet potato topping, along with some griddled vegetables - yum!

*Side note: every time I talk about 'home-made' anything, I think of the cafe I spotted once in Berlin, which, in an attempt to demonstrate its exotic/multilingual credentials, had a sign outside, proudly proclaiming 'Cake Made Home'. Always made me chuckle!

Baked sweet potato with houmous and vegetables

My dinner :-)



2 comments:

  1. How strange, me and my Mum were just saying we should try making houmous. Is it just chickpeas, tahini and garlic? Also, on the subject of houmous, have you tried the Sabra extra houmous? You can get it in Sainsbury's and its amazing.

    Anna x

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    1. Ah, it is our psychic link, obviously I must have known deep down that you would appreciate this particular post! Yes, houmous is pretty much chickpeas, tahini and garlic - plus lemon juice, oil and water, and a bit of seasoning. It is definitely one you have to play around with a bit, in order to get it just the way you like it. You'll have to let me know if you give it a go how you get on! I've never tried the Sabra brand of houmous, but will have to look out for it, thanks for the tip! xx

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