We have been having a little debate about hummus at my house. We lovers of hummus. Whenever we don't know what to eat, we eat hummus. Cook's Illustrated did an article recently on restaurant style hummus. Sometimes this magazine can really take things a little too far. The mad scientist of food magazines. I guess it's kind of cool to be able to taste a hundred versions of a recipe to perfect it, but the reality is, for those of us who aren't tasting a hundred versions side by side, once you get beyond the big things that change the recipe, the little tweaks aren't REALLY going to be noticed. Apologies to Cook's, but they aren't.
But having read through the issue and the article, I was wondering if it was worth the bother to make homemade hummus. I have to admit, I don't usually make my own, even though it's dead easy. But it's so easy to buy good hummus that it just didn't seem worth the bother. So I decided to become a mad scientist for a moment myself and have my family do a blind taste test.
On the left, Sun-Ni Hummus, which is the brand I usually eat. I am a Sun-Ni fan. It has a silkier texture than a lot of store hummus, is on the lemony side, and I can recognize all the ingredients on the label. On the right, my homemade hummus, based on the Cook's recipe, which is a pretty standard blend of olive oil, fresh lemon juice, tahini paste, garlic, garbanzos, salt, cumin and cilantro and red pepper. I added more lemon and olive oil plus some Spanish pimenton. Recipes are so easy to come by, that I will not reproduce any here (and despite what Cook's says, theirs is good, but probably not the BEST ever).
The verdict....
Homemade is the clear winner. So for the ten minute investment in time and food processing, I have been whipping up a lot more of my own on the weekends. But much like my criticism of the mad scientists at Cook's, if you don't try them side by side, your favorite store brand probably still tastes pretty darn good.
