Basic Hummus Recipe

Bread. It’s a typical Dutch thing if you’d ask me. Dutch people eat a lot of bread. For breakfast, with lunch, inbetween. Weekdays, weekend days. Bread seems to be the basis of the Dutch diet. Add cow-cheese to it and there it is: your typical Dutch lunch. And so, since I’ve gone vegan I made some adjustments as to what I eat on my bread. One of them is hummus! Hummus is like the ultimate go-to for vegan sandwiches. If there’s a vegan option in a mainstream lunch cafe it’s hummus 99% of the time. It’s easy to make and can go with any bread. For breakfast, during lunch, on toast or even with dinner. And that’s why I am sharing the basic recipe for hummus that I use.

Health and Plastic

I have to be honest: I don’t like that we eat that much bread in The Netherlands. I do like the taste of bread, but I am trying to eat a more varied diet. Salads, different grains, veggies, just anything else. I think eating so much bread like the average Dutch person is not varied enough. But when I do eat bread, I quite like hummus on it. Especially with Lebanese bread, hmmm. Anyway, I make hummus myself. I have two reasons for that. One is plastic. I try to reduce my waste where I can. Hummus is always stored in plastic when you buy it in a store. When I make it myself I can reduce a lot of plastic on a yearly basis. The second reason is the taste. Honestly, homemade hummus is just a lot better than store-bought hummus. Waaaaay better. Here’s the recipe I use:

Ingredients (all organic)

• 125 grams of dried chickpeas
• 0,5 teaspoon of baking soda
• 750 milliliters of water
• 135 milliliters of tahini
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• 2 cloves of garlic
• Cooking liquid (see instructions below)
• Salt

Instructions

Making hummus takes time. Not because the recipe is complicated, but because the chickpeas need to soak overnight and also need to cook (don’t use chickpeas from a can or glass, that’s not as tasty and has more waste to it). So, the first thing you need to do is put chickpeas in a bowl and add enough water so that they can soak overnight. The next morning (or evening) they’re ready to be cooked. First, you add the baking soda to a pan and add the chickpeas. You just bake them a little, no water yet. After about 5 minutes on a low fire you add the water and cook the chickpeas. I think the cooking takes about 30 minutes. I just do it randomly. The chickpeas basically need to cook until they’re a little soft and that you can crush one between your vingers. I just check every once in a while. Now, this is important! Don’t throw away the cooking liquid, you’ll need it. You just grab a bowl, put a colander onto it so that the liquid will end up in the bowl and the chickpeas in the colander.

After this it’s just a matter of mixing all the ingredients. This can be done in all sorts of machines. A food processor, a mixer or a blender. It all works. I add all the ingredients except for the cooking liquid. Then I add a little bit of the cooking liquid just to try. I mix the ingredients and see how the structure turns out. Too firm still? Then I add more cooking liquid until I like the structure.

Flavors and Shopping

As the title says, this is the basic recipe. You can add anything you like from here. Rhas El Hanout for example, or chili. You can make any hummus flavor you want just by adding herbs. If you serve the hummus with a dish, maybe with couscous, then it’s nice to add olive oil and a bit of parsley and eat it warm if you can! That’s the absolute best, hmmmm. As I said above, I prefer to buy all ingredients organic because that’s just better for biodiversity and the overall health of the planet. I also try to buy all the ingredients zero waste. The chickpeas in paper or in a bulk shop, the baking soda in cardboard, the tahini in glass and the salt in paper or bulk. There is a little bit of waste, but it’s all recyclable, no plastic!

Enjoy!

Yours sincerely,
Romee

Source of the recipe: Basic Hummus from ‘Jerusalem’ by Ottolenghi.