Tastebud Chicago

It’s 2007, hummus is like a 1987 burrito, still sort of a teeny bit on the edge of common American food. Almost everyone has had it, but you’ll occasionally run into someone who’s never heard of the stuff. Seriously, it’s rare, but it does happen.

Hummus, wikipedia tells us, is “a dip made of chickpea paste and tahini (sesame seed paste), with flavorings such as olive oil, garlic, paprika, and lemon juice.” Hummus, like many words of Arabic origin, has a few different spellings. These: houmous, hommus, hummous or humus, are all the same. You can find tubs of it at Jewel for a couple of dollars. However, making your own is easy, fun, and gives you lots of room for experimentation.

Camri first started making her own hummus in high school. Camri bought the book, Cooking with the Dead, just a few short weeks before Jerry Garcia died. She’s sort of a hippy. That book is pretty fun, it’s a bunch of recipes from people that followed the Dead around. There’s a lot of vegetarian recipes in there, lots of grilled cheese, lots of things with beans. The stories are the best part though. Nothing quite like a bunch of dead-heads explaining why they chose to make their hummus with paprika. It’s intense.

The recipe that Camri based her hummus on is courtesy of a dead-head named, ahem, Amilius (his name means “Spark from the Light of God”). Amilius explains that, “[he] began making hummus sandwiches because he felt it was important to sell healthy food, because that was what he was committed to eating himself.” Thanks Amilius.

So, young High School hippy Camri took Amilius’ recipe and made it. She liked it. She discovered that hummus is a blank slate. It begs to be fiddled with. Over the next ten years she toyed with the recipe until she finally found what she believes to be hummus perfection. Here is her formula, she presents it to you because she “feels it’s important to sell healthy food, because that was what she was committed to eating herself”:

In a mini food processor combine the following until a creamy hummus'y consistency is achieved:
1 can garbanzo beans (drained and rinsed)
1/4 cup Tahini
1/4 cup lemon juice (or the juice of 2 lemons)
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
dill, oregano, cayenne, thyme, salt and pepper
Serving suggestions: pita chips, pretzels,
hummus sandwiches with feta, green peppers,
red peppers, onions, or a Daily Bar & Grill style pita sandwich
with sprouts, goat cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette dip.

About that mini food processor, it’s $40 at Amazon, and worth every penny. We’ve had one for years, and use it more often than its big brother. If you don’t have a food processor, you could mix the ingredients by hand, but we highly recommend having one of these little wonders in your kitchen. You’ll end up finding all kinds of good stuff you can chop.