Hummus with aubergine

Hummus with aubergine
© Lena Staal

Corti's Kitchen Note: How to make the tastiest hummus

Everyone loves hummus, but the beige spread only tastes irresistible if you take the trouble to cook the chickpeas yourself – and soak them properly first.

Chickpeas are one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world – evidence of them being grown dates back more than 10,000 years. The legumes require very little water, which makes them an enormously important and sustainable food – especially with a changing climate.

Between Baghdad and Casablanca, chickpeas have been ground for centuries with sesame paste, lemon juice and garlic into a cool, beige-coloured spread that is extremely versatile, nutritious – and amazingly delicious. However it has only become established elsewhere in recent decades. Hummus has enjoyed global success since celebrity chefs with an Israeli connection such as Eyal Shani and Yotam Ottolenghi began marketing the delightful dip.

This leads to sometimes heated discussions about the cultural appropriation of Arabic gastronomic heritage. However Iraqi Jews, known as Mizrahi Jews, whose cuisine is a central influence on contemporary Israeli cuisine, have always had hummus in their repertoire. The Israeli version of hummus differs decisively from others in its recipe: it contains an almost unreasonable amount of tahini sesame paste, which not only makes it creamier but also gives it an excessively delicious taste.

What doesn't work well is hummus purchased ready-made from the supermarket. With acidifiers and chemically preserved, only the name and the colour remain of the glory that is created from very few ingredients. Less egregious, but equally disapproved of by hummus purists, is the shortcut of using canned chickpeas instead of soaking them overnight and cooking them for hours until soft. Organic devotees will definitely find this is a viable recipe for hummus heaven.

Cooking chickpeas themselves is very simple: soak 250 grams of dried chickpeas overnight in plenty of cold water enriched with a teaspoon of baking soda. This prevents the calcium, which is abundant in some tap water, from stirring the pectin molecules in chickpeas' cell walls into "cement", as the founder of molecular gastronomy Hervé This explains in Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking

Instead, the alkaline solution of bicarbonate of soda causes the pectins to split, which promotes softening. For the same reason, after 24 hours and adding fresh water, add half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda again. After 30 minutes, salt gently and cook for a good 1.5 hours until the chickpeas can be easily mashed into a creamy paste between thumb and forefinger. Leave to cool in the cooking water and use as described in the recipe below.

Hummus with aubergine & preserved lemon


Severin Corti
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