If you could have only hummus or baba ghanouj with your falafel or flatbread for the rest of your life...

I don't agree to that

Hoomus. It's more versatile. You can pop to the shops during your lunch break and pick some up with a pack of pitas.

Depends on how strictly you define 'hummus.'

If you're going with the literal definition (chickpeas), then fuck off, baba ghanouz. We had some good memories, but it's about time you GTFO, you delicious bastard.

If you're going with the westernised understanding (a cold mash of chickpeas mixed with sesame paste, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice and occasionally other ingredients), then peace out, hummus. You're pretty good, but not as good as baba ghanouz and there are other mashed bean dishes I like just as much (if not more) like bigilla, refritos and that Somali one I can't remember the name of made of black-eyed peas.

If you're going with bean spreads in general, baba ghanouz can get hit by a bus for all I care. I needs me my mashed beans.

Part Arab here.
Never seen it with hot sauce but Levantine and Yemeni families, when making hummus for large groups, serve it with a chili paste called sakhwik. That's the closest approximation I can come up with for the spelling since it uses two sounds not present in English. Anyway, it's made from fresh chillies, garlic, dried pennyroyal, fresh parsley and fresh-ground coriander and cumin seeds as well as olive oil. If you can't find pennyroyal, you can mix dried oregano, thyme and mint in a 2:1:1 ratio for a similar flavour. Za'atar, a popular herb blend used in Levantine cuisine, can also be used in place of pennyroyal.
If you make hummus for a gathering, it's served with a large dollop of sakhwik in the middle of it and an additional drizzle of olive oil. This way, if you want your hummus plain, you just scoop out from the plain parts of the bowl towards the edge. If you want it pungent, you scoop from the middle. If you want mild, you scoop a little from both parts.

Your description about scooping from the middle reminded me of when I recently went to an Ethiopian restaurant with an Egyptian friend of mine. She demonstrated the proper way to use the injera, showing you should scrape it towards the edge of the plate and move it upward in an arc - and expect to get some of the food on your fingers. Once you get the hang of it, it's the easiest way to consume the dish. She said she used to eat this way all the time as a kid.

hummus

not a big fan of eggplant

iS IT WORTH IT TO MAKE MY OWN HUMMUS?

Well yeah it's cheap as shit

Dried chickpeas swell to about twice their raw size when cooked, so 1lb of chickpeas makes a little over 2lbs of hummus. Dry chickpeas costs only $1.19/lb or so and hummus is either $3 for 7oz (less than a half pound), $6 for 1lb or $10 for 2lbs. With all the other ingredients necessary for hummus, the total cost only sets you back about $1.15 for a pound of the stuff (around $2.29 if you're making hummus from a whole pound of dry chickpeas).
It's way cheaper.

Even using canned chickpeas, it's considerably cheaper, costing only about $1.55/lb.
Considering how quick and easy it is to make hummus from canned chickpeas, there is no reason to buy it ready made unless you only like it super, super smooth and/or you don't have a food processor (I mash the chickpeas by hand because I don't like it smooth).

Money wise yes, but i find it hard to make good hummus, idk what they add to make it so creamy but when i do it with only chickpeas and spices its always so..... non creamy

lb of matter becomes 2lbs

volume vs mass faggot

>I have no idea how to cook chickpeas
>what the fuck is adding water
>what is reading

I bet you're a fat fucking retard.

Tahini, oil and lemon juice

Ancient durkadurka secret, but I'm willing to tell ajam about it.

Wash your hands super well.
Get some cooked chickpeas and put'em into a bowl.
Mush'em up with your hands and fingers.
Rinse your hands and either salt-paste (more traditional) or grate a bit of garlic into the bowl.
Add the juice from a wedge of lemon (you can add more later if you like it tangier), a spoonful of sesame paste and a drizzle of regular olive oil (not extra virgin, just regular).
Whip it all together with a fork.
Taste it and adjust lemon, sesame and oil as needed to your preferred flavour and texture.
Scoop into a serving dish and smooth it out.
Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil on top and serve.
Many people add other ingredients to theirs, but this is the basic recipe and method.
It's easy. Takes all of five minutes.

Why regular olive oil and not EVOO? I do everything the same but use EVOO throughout.

Comparing pounds to mass
Your family should have been gassed

I asked my grandmother that once.

She explained that olive oils are used analogously as to how wines are used in European cuisines, each one used in particular ways and for particular dishes.
Many Arab countries don't grade olive oil the same way as the rest of the world and their oil isn't generally sold outside of local production areas. North Africa is an obvious exception, but the Middle East keeps its olive oil in its own countries. Anyway, dark olive oil is the kind that would be used over there. It's almost the same thing as extra virgin, although a bit stronger even than that. Regular olive oil is used to make it the dish and dark used to finish the dish because it's too strong to use the whole dish through. This is how it's done for all dishes: regular for cooking, dark for dressing. If your EV is not as strong as dark olive oil and/or you like it fine with EV, then by all means, use it.

If you want to try dark olive oil, the one I buy is Palestinian and comes in 1l dark green glass bottles at $10 a pop. A bit expensive, but a little goes a long way.
The only problem is: dark olive oil tends to go rancid more quickly than other olive oils, so if you're not using it, you'll have wasted your money.

what are you even talking about

Baba ghanouj for me. I love that grilled eggplant.

Definitely hummus. Eggplant isn't very nutritious.

I usually make my own, but what's with grocery store hummus not having lemon juice?

My basic recipe:

1-1.5 cups chickpeas or white beans, soaked until soft and pressure cooked 10 minutes

2 large cloves garlic

at least half peeled or juiced lemon

about 2 tablespoons of whatever fatty seeds or nuts I have, usually uncut peanut butter because it's cheap

a bunch of pepper

cup water

1/4 teaspoon salt. rusty Pakistan meme salt is best :^) Sometimes I add salty hot sauce instead

add or garnish with paprika and/or coriander and such if you like

place everything in high speed blender (Blendtec, Vitamix, Cleanblend...), put on ear protection, and turn to maximum speed until it's stiff, about a minute. If you don't have a good blender like that, lay off the self-necessitating products for a bit until you have enough pocket change to get one.

Am I doing it right?

That actually sounds like a pretty fun way to eat food.

>white beans
>no olive oil
>no sesame paste
>no parsley
>water
>pink meme salt because the levant is so culinarily close to the subcontinent
>hot sauce
>coriander
Hummus literally means "chickpeas." In durkaspeak. The dish's name in Arabic would translate to English as "chickpeas with sesame paste." The name contains the two most important ingredients to the recipe and you forgo one of them half the time and omit the other completely. What you make might be tasty, but it's not hummus.
If you can't get sesame paste, you can make yoghurt hummus, which is common in Levantine households (but not in restaurants abroad, oddly enough). You omit the lemon and sesame paste and swap olive oil for full fat yoghurt and a bit of melted butter. The chickpeas are mashed as described in then whipped with the dairy and salt-pasted garlic. This variation tends to include spices and chilies in the hummus itself while the regular one does not. You can also add finely minced pickled lemon for a tangier flavour, but it's not strictly necessary. It also uses herbs other than parsley (which is never used with yoghurt hummus for some reason), coriander being one possibility. Others include pennyroyal, mint or thyme, though seldom more than one herb is used when making it.
Like regular hummus, it's served drizzled with extra virgin olive oil.

Hummus. Definitely.

Baba Ghanoush is delicious, but doesn't pair as well with falafel or kibbeh or shawarma IMO.

Also, Persian eggplant dip is 9999999 times greater than Baba Ghanoush.

Thank you for your hummus wisdom based arab. Mashallah

>If you could have only hummus or baba ghanouj with your falafel or flatbread for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
For my falafel, I don't want chickpea hummus with my chickpea fritters for redundancy, nor baba. I just want a delicious and generous amount of tahini, lots of tomatoes, pickled onions or cabbage, cucumbers, and maybe a touch of raw chili paste if the mood strikes me.

With bread, as a snack, I guess I appreciate baba ghanouj more for being harder to prepare, a real labor of love to roast and smash up, but I wouldn't sub out something smoky and creamy for life, though baba is orgasmically good. Smoke can remove some variety. Hummus is a touch more versatile where you can vary toppings and not have it get old.

Homemade hummus done right will be creamy from removing the skins of soaked chickpeas, and use lots of fresh lemon. If we're talking Sabra, supremely spicy is #1 flavor. They discontinued the luscious lemon, which had preserved bits of lemon on top.
P.S. Sabra just issued a listeria based voluntary recall 1 hour ago! Thank you Fox News for carrying it first.
sabra.com/recall.html

>P.S. Sabra just issued a listeria based voluntary recall 1 hour ago! Thank you Fox News for carrying it first.
>sabra.com/recall.html

Grrr. I ran into that at Walmart yesterday morning when I was buying groceries. Didn't know about the recall then, and neither did the clerk, and neither did the manager, so they had to get the manager's manager who finally realized what was going on, and told me to get a different brand.

I got Tribe. It's not as good.

Lots of oil doofus

>falafel are made from chickpeas
Just Israeli ones.

The name 'falafel' literally means 'made from fava beans' in super old sandspeak (not quite Arabic, but close). Properly, they're made from ground fresh (or frozen) fava/broad beans with aromatics and spices held together by just enough chickpea flour to do so. Because they're made from fresh beans, they're green inside.

Israel, however, switched to chickpeas. I've heard it's because of a genetic propensity among Jews for allergy or disease to or brought on by consumption of fava beans. Looking it up just now, it seems to be mostly true, but it's prevalent among Mizrahi Jews, not Ashkenazim, who are the majority in Israel: jewishgeneticdiseases.org/diseases/glucose-6-phosphate-dehydogenase-deficiency-g6pd/

Falafel is Christian Arab food, enjoyed originally by Copts then spread to Melkites, Maronites and Syriacs. My grandmother used to tell me stories of her Jewish friends. I know that historically, the Kurdish Jews, Syriac Christians and Maronites actually had a really close knit and pleasant coexistence and a shared community until the creation of Israel, so Kurdish Jews likely learnt to make falafel from us, but swapped out the fava for chickpeas. I would guess that they then introduced Israel to their version of falafel and the Ashkenazim adopted this chickpea version from the Kurds.

Chickpea ones are not bad, per se, but they tend to not be as flavourful as the ones made from fava because the Ashkenazi majority don't use spices as much as native Middle Easterners do.

If you ever get the chance to find an Arab Christian church having a cook out during either Lent, look for the little old ladies carrying containers into the church. No doubt, at least seventeen of them will have brought falafel and you can try our version and decide for yourself if you like ours or the Israeli one better.

And sorry for my long posts ITT, but I'm trying to be as informative as possible and dispel some misconceptions about what we eat.

Well thanks, user. I'm glad I'm not being a total nuisance.

It seems to be only some Israelis that did that. I remember seeing an Israeli chef on Iron Chef America and he used Favas.

>8296752

show me an ashkenazi who wells falafel. it's mostly the mizrahi people who make the falafel around here.

>wells falafel
Do you mean 'eats falafel' or 'makes falafel,' user?