Food Fact of the Day – Week’s Summary

Making hummus white and creamy as opposed to yellow and chunky is one of the biggest issues facing the world today. Though, truth be told, if you follow a few rules, you will be able to guarantee yourself consistent and delicious hummus. Here’s how you do it:

1. Soak your chickpeas overnight and add a teaspoon or two of sodium bicarbonate into the mix. Bicarb is essential for smooth hummus, but the next day, make sure you rinse the chickpeas under cold water for at least 3 to 5 minutes
2. Boil it to an inch of its life. If you have a pressure cooker, now’s the time to use it. If you don’t, at least an hour and a half of boiling is needed. The chickpeas need to become super soft
3. Drain your chickpeas but reserve some of the boiling liquid. Blend the chickpeas when still hot in a food processor on their own until they are completely smooth.
4. Use only Lebanese tahini. I love the Kalajiyeh brand. Tahini from other countries is usually darker and has a different, more bitter flavour. Add tahini, the lemon juice, crushed garlic and salt after you’ve processed the chickpeas into the food processor and process again.
5. Taste and adjust seasoning. If you want your hummus to be runnier, as tahini has the characteristic of sucking up moisture, use some of the preserved boiling liquid. Remember, when hummus cools down, especially if you refrigerate it, it becomes less runny.
6. To make the hummus whiter, process the hummus and add an ice cube or two as the machine is running until the ice is encorporated. The colour will become paler.

Plant usable nitrogen (fertilizer), until we learned how to manufacture it, was exclusively produced by bacteria on roots of legumes and by lightning that would occasionally free up the nitrogen to fall down with the rain (fertility rain). That’s why farmers used to rotate crops, so that the nitrogen using crop (corn for example) was alternated by a nitrogen producing crop (legumes). Today’s technology frees up the atmosphere’s nitrogen through an unsustainable process that burns fossil fuels. We feed our plants with fossil fuel derived nitrogen. Fossil fuel gives us nitrogen that gives us corn that gives us factory farmed cows that we eat. We are no longer dependant on the sun for our food, which, as a medium to long term strategy, is unsustainable. Ask for grass fed beef and chemical free fruit and veg.