The recipes of making hummus are plentiful on the internet and many are just not fine tuned. I have been making hummus almost daily since my last post a few weeks ago. The new recipe is to remove the skins, given the texture should be absolutely smooth in our opinion.

Steps are as follows:

One: take the chickpeas and soak them over night. The idea of adding some sodium bicarbonate is still not determined. Change the water or not is still not determined. In our view much of the flavor comes from the chickpeas so why tamper too much with it before cooking.

Two: cook the chickpeas until they become semi-cooked, enough when you squeeze them into between your fingers and you can see the skin comes off easily. Then take a large pot, a sieve that fits into the large pot. It is key to use a pasta strainer type with a flat bottom, not a colander type. The chickpeas now get a bath to agitate the skins. In this process we have not tested the addition of sodium bicarbonate to see if it helps. So place the hot chickpeas into an ice water bath and do not discard the water from the ice water.

Three: take the watered chickpeas while they are still in the water and agitate them between your palms to remove the skins. The water can get too cold, so during the process you can have a second pan to hold the colander over and agitate the chickpeas alternating between the two.

Four: the removal of the skins is easy once you have plenty of water as many float to the top and others sink to the bottom. You need to discard as many as possible.

Five: You have the reserved liquid in the cooking pot and you place the (skin removed) chickpeas back into the pot for more cooking. You pour off some of the ice water and you’ll see there is plenty of chickpea residue which you pour back into the cooking pot.

Six: once you have the chickpeas as soft as you wish and for us on a low flame 2-3 hours, you are ready to add to the stock whatever you wish. Many recipes add it at the end once you are turning the chickpeas into a smooth blend, but I prefer to get the taste into the chickpea water. It is tricky a bit as you need to experiment to get the ratios perfected. That is the nature of making hummus and why Arabs have perfected it after many years of family practice.