I bean wanting to dip into hummus

It's been surprisingly hot in Seattle lately. Hot enough that, for a couple days, turning on the stove or the oven to cook anything just seems irresponsible. Of course, I still need to eat, so the best plan I could think of was to make a bunch of something I could keep eating for a while, without needing to reheat. Hummus seemed like a good choice.

Somehow, I managed to get my heart set on roasted garlic hummus. Because, I don't know, taking a recipe that usually just involves blending things and adding an element of baking just seemed like the best idea in the heat.

And roasting garlic correctly, meh. I grabbed a couple cloves, doused them in olive oil, and stuck them in the toaster oven for a while. That thing still produced a surprising amount of heat.

One hummus recipe I found said that the best way to make the best hummus was to add the ingredients one at a time and then blend for about a minute in between. Since this one website said that was the best way, I figured I'd try it.

First, tahini. Tahini is surprisingly liquid, and surprisingly easy to spill all over the place. I was expecting it to be the consistency of peanut butter, but no.

After tahini was the lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and some basil.

I found basil in the freezer that was bought and forgotten last time hummus was made at my house. Basil freezes surprisingly well... just saying.

The problem was, well, the volume of all these ingredients just wasn't enough for my blender.

Everything got sprayed up on the side of the blender and had to be scraped back down every 10 seconds or so in order to keep them blending. So I figured I'd just add the chickpeas.

The recipe also suggested skinning the chickpeas was helpful, though a bit of a waste of time. I just shook them and removed obvious skins from the strainer before adding them to the blender.

Unfortunately, adding the chickpeas didn't really help. The solid to liquid proportions were off, and the blender continued to choke. I added some more olive oil to help it along, but it kept making weird blooping noises (see video).

I eventually got enough olive oil in to make it blend smoothly, but that was a bit too much olive oil for the hummus. I had some issues with separation in the following days.

At first I wasn't a huge fan of the hummus, it was a bit too tart and grainy.

However, the next day, when I pulled the hummus out for lunch, it was amazing. The flavors all settled overnight and suddenly I had hummus better than any hummus I've ever bought.

Totally worth the effort. Would be worth even more if I doubled the recipe so I didn't have to scrape the darn blender walls constantly.

Hummus

Ingredients

1 can of chickpeas / garbanzo beans

1/4 cup of lemon juice, or one lemon's worth

1/4 cup of tahini

Some cloves of garlic - roasting optional

2+ tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1. Dump all ingredients in blender
2. Blend until smooth
3. Eat, or refrigerate overnight for best flavory goodness