My recipe is just chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, salt, and a bit of cumin and paprika. Actually, so long as you have good tahini, a bit of lemon juice, and you prep the chickpeas right, any recipe will do, and hummus is massively customizable (try adding in chopped, cooked, drained spinach, or sun dried tomatoes, or olives, or chilli peppers) I just have a few hummus tips. (or rather, hummus :autism
1)
WORK FROM DRIED CHICKPEAS rather than canned garbanzo beans. The two are not the same. You want the stuff that comes dried from the middle east, not the canned stuff from mexico or south america.
2)
PEEL THEM BEFORE YOU COOK THEM. Once you take the time to do this extra step, and taste the results, you would sooner forego making it at all than make it without taking this step. Peeling chickpeas is a tedious son of a bitch, but it's totally worth it. Your hummus will be silky smooth rather than chunky and fibrous (apologies to
@JuanLee but that's the sense i get from your picture).
To peel them, first, let them soak overnight. The next day, before you boil them, peel each individual chickpea. Most of the time, you can just pinch a small hole with your nail and then squeeze out the core from the skin in a single go. You're not actually "peeling" them so much as you're squeezing the good stuff out of the skin. When you finish, you'll have a whole pile of skin, and you'll notice that it's utterly tasteless and gross. You will never want it in your hummus again once you see a pile of it sitting there being gross alongside the pile of pure, chickpea goodness. Boil those until they're soft, and use
those as your hummus base.
3)
USE THE WATER LEFTOVER FROM BOILING THE CHICKPEAS in your recipe. This is another crucial step towards making your hummus silky smooth rather than chunky. Most recipes, like the one in the OP, include olive oil. There are some intuitive reasons for doing so, but it's actually not necessary. Rather, it's a garnish poured over hummus when ready to serve, and not added to the main recipe of things to be blitzed. I imagine it's thought to be an ingredient because the olive oil will serve as a liquid that will smooth out the texture of the hummus. But instead, what you ought to use to achieve this effect, is the very water that you used to boil the chickpeas in. This
enhances the flavor of the hummus rather than dilutes it with olive oil flavor.
edit: regarding step 2), if you can't be bothered to always peel each one of them (i fully understand), another strategy is to boil them first in the skin, and then skim off the skins that inevitably float to the top, or just pick out whatever skins you can be bothered to pick out once you have them already cooked. your hummus will benefit from each skin that does not make it into the final product.
