I Love: Hummus

As I said in the post on Pulses - I love chickpeas, and following on from that, I tend to love stuff made out of chickpeas. Like Hummus. So as part of the whole VeganMoFo thing I thought it would a good idea to taste test a bunch of different hummus recipes from some the of the cookbooks I have lying about the place to see which one we like the best.

There were rules, basically it had to;

1. be a plain, basic hummus recipe - so no fancy added stuff like sundried tomatoes, roasted peppers or olives,

2. have no other nuts or beans added - so no white bean hummus, no cashew and chickpea hummus etc, and

3. go easy on added spices - so nothing to cumin-y for example

I was looking for recipes that were pretty much chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice and oil (if used) with a little seasoning. I ended up with 5 recipes that filled the requirements, I then adjusted the recipe sizes so they were all made with 1 C chickpeas, I didn't want end up with mountains of the stuff! and got busy.

I did a taste test by myself with roasted potatoes, see the picture - I love hummus on all sorts of stuff - and then later with H on nacho chips. I ranked them, he ranked them and then we put our scores together. So, drum roll please, in our house, using the cookbooks I have, with our comments, in order of preference we have Hummus by -
ReFresh
Smooth, even flavoured with nothing too dominant, not oily and good textured. "What I expect hummus to be"

Get it Ripe
Good texture, not oily, garlic comes through well.

Gluten Free Vegan
Most tahini tasting, texture good, not too oily or garlicky.

Veganomicon
Garlic / tahini balance good, creamy, but a little too oily tasting.

Little Vegan Monsters
Too much bite, a lot of zing, very garlic-y and over oily tasting.

The first three were the ones we'd have be happy to have had more of, and would use again. I think the main thing about them for us was that they had little or no oil in the recipe so the chickpeas were really the star of the show!