A Scientific Exploration of Houmous / Hummus with Recipe
I have eaten houmous since I was a youngster and viewed it as a healthy option to fatty spreads. Imagine my surprise when I examined the nutritional content of supermarket houmous and discovered it was over 25% fat!
As a University student, my hippy housemates and I would make 2 litres of houmous at a time and freeze it for future use. I decided to hark back to my student days and make my own to check the fat content.
Tin of chick peas
1 lemon, juiced
1 tbsp tahini (sesame seed paste, a middle eastern ingredient now commonly available)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, you can use roast garlic for a mellower flavour
Pulverise! Add extra water, rather than oil, to get it to the consistency that you like.
This recipe contains 31g of fat altogether, or 8.9g per 100 grams (about 9%). This is the real deal and tastes more like authentic houmous than supermarket houmous (supermarkets add extra fat to make it more palatable to our taste). Jamie Oliver’s recipe has twice the tahini and olive oil as this recipe, but I personally think the extra fat is not necessary. When making my own, I always use good quality olive oil, however supermarket brands use rapeseed oil as it is cheaper. It will also have less fat if you cook the dried chickpeas from scratch, as a tin of chickpeas has 7g fat, whilst dried equivalent has about 3g. To use dried chickpeas, soak in cold water overnight, change the water and then boil for a very, very long time until tender. The kind of thing I made time for when I was a student!
