Amateurs with Knives

Starting our February Magazine of the Month, Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2009, off on the right foot, I started with the first recipe in the book: Restaurant-Style Hummus.

The test kitchen staffers who created this recipe for hummus often found themselves, like us, purchasing hummus from grocery stores, until one day they ordered it in a restaurant. The creamy, flavorful hummus they were served convinced them once and for all to create a definitive version that could be conveniently made at home.

I love how the CI magazines take you through the thought processes and steps that determined their final recipe.

Traditional hummus, the chef notes, is made with dried chickpeas, definitely superior to canned, but found that canned beans produced a taste and texture for the overall hummus that was “perfectly acceptable.” Before deciding on the canned chickpeas, both were experimented with.

Everything is conveniently done in the food processor. After the chickpeas are ground together with garlic and spices, it was found that the best results were produced when the additional ingredients were slowly poured into to the mixture while the food processor ran. So that’s exactly what we did.

A mixture of lemon juice and water are then slowly added through the feed tube while the processor is doing its work. The mixture definitely becomes a smoother, creamier version of itself. As soon as the lemon juice and water are incorporated, an extra virgin olive oil and tahini mix is added in the same way, slowly and steadily into the processor while it’s running.

It really comes together quickly and the results are amazing. The hummus is then poured into a bowl and refrigerated for 30 minutes, then served up with slices of pita bread.

We dug into this during the Super Bowl and found that it was creamy and flavorful. Although I wasn’t an initial hummus fan, my household has been digging into this every night since I made it while we wait for dinner.

Delicious.