Creamy Restaurant Style Hummus

Today let’s talk about hummus.

I have been making hummus for as long as I can remember. In fact, it was one of the first things that I learned to make as a young girl, and when I first became a vegetarian at 13, it was a staple around the house, and a family favourite that I was in charge of making as the resident hummus maker in the house.

I was first taught to make hummus with a can of drained chickpeas, and I continued to make it this way for many years. What I could never sort out was what accounted for the difference in the texture between my homemade hummus, and the hummus I would have at restaurants and buy in grocery stores. The hummus I made at home was always a bit more ‘rustic’. No matter how long I ran the mixture in the food processor, or what ratio of ingredients I used, I could never quite replicate the smooth, creamy texture of the hummus I was served in Middle Eastern restaurants.

Perhaps you have made hummus before, and you have noticed the same thing.

Today, I am going to teach you the secret of making creamy restaurant style hummus at home in the quickest easiest way possible.

When I began my quest for the creamiest hummus, some quick research turned up the tip that the best hummus was made from rehydrating your own chickpeas, and that removing the skin from the outside of the chickpea was the secret to the creamy restaurant style hummus of my dreams. To test this theory, I rehydrated dried chickpeas in a pot on our stove one afternoon, and then spent a serious amount of time painstakingly removing the skin from each individual chickpea. The difference in the taste and texture was definitely what I was looking for, but spending an hour plucking skins off of chickpeas was not something I wanted to do anytime again soon – even for the perfect hummus!

Let me introduce you to chana!

Chana is a varietal of chickpea that is grown in Pakistan, India, and other places in Southeast Asia. It is a bit smaller than the garbanzo bean that you may be used to, and it comes dried, split and without the skin! If you have an ethnic food section in your grocery store, take a look for them there – you should be able to find them along with other dried beans. We get ours at our local Asian food store. Believe me, they are a game changer when it comes to making hummus!

We rehydrate our beans in our Instant Pot. If you have one of those you can add them to the pot, cover with water and cook on high pressure for 15 minutes. If you don’t you can cook them on the stove – because they are smaller and split they will cook in less than half the time it takes to cook regular dried garbanzo beans. From there, you just blend up all the ingredients in your food processor and you are ready to go!