What do you do when you’ve a potluck request for your super-smooth like store-bought, (Jerusalem-style) hummus, and you somehow hallucinate you have another day to soak the dried chickpeas, forgetting that to make it you would have to be grinding chickpeas in your food processor at 7am?
I had a can of chickpeas left over from the great hummus experiment, sadly unused because nobody in my house would choose willingly to eat chickpeas. So I figured: perfect time for an experiment.
You can read about it in-depth on my other post, but in a nutshell, the Jerusalem cookbook hummus comes out better and smoother than any old canned chickpea/normal hummus because of a simple chemistry trick: you use an ordinary household alkaline substance, AKA baking soda, to weaken the pectic bonds.
Well, my friends, if you want to use canned chickpeas, you can have your cake and eat it too. The canned chickpeas have tough outer skins; even though they are cracked from the heat of the canning process, they don’t blend quite as well, and obviously they don’t need an extended period of cooking. But, you can drain them, rinse them, and sauté them in baking soda just as if they were fresh out of the soaking bowl.
I sautéed them, filled the pan with enough hot water to cover them, and let it simmer just for a couple minutes–after all, they’re technically already cooked! And then I continued on with the recipe just as if I was using the dried chickpeas.
I got the same buttery smooth hummus I got with the dried chickpeas. No soaking. No half hour of simmering.
Now why would you ever need to go to the grocery store to buy it?
Find the recipe at the bottom of the post, here and just follow the instructions for Jerusalem cookbook, with the modification above!
