One Ingredient Challenge: Hummus

Part of an ongoing series of cooking from scratch. That is, we cook something from basic items that don't have multiple ingredients (e.g. store-bought spaghetti sauce includes all sorts of spices and maybe other stuff too; we'd start with tomatoes and individual spices and add them together to make our own sauce). See other challenges here.

Finding an especially good hummus is not as easy as you might think. Having bookmarked a hummus recipe from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, we decided to make our own to see how it came out. The book is all about various foods that can be made at home and whether it is cheaper to make or buy those foods. We've had plenty of success before with the book (though vanilla bean prices have gone up, making the store-bought vanilla extract more cost-effective) and were hoping for another positive outcome.

The recipe starts with chick peas,which we soaked overnight.

Soaking peas

The next day, we prepped other ingredients, like lemon zest and lemon juice.

Zesting a lemon

Juicing a lemon

Blending the ingredients was a fun process for our daughter.

Mixing ingredients in our little food processor

Adding tahini

The final batch was a lot of humus. The taste test worked out very well!

Testing the final product

Approved!