The Funky Kitchen

It has been a little bit of trial and error, this search for a lemon hummus that met my standards.

Do you ever just get an idea in your head, and you can’t accept any attempts at it until it’s just right?

This happens with me with recipes fairly often. I had a hankering for lemon hummus, but it needed to be intensely lemony. Not bright shiny lemon, as lemons are wont to be, either. It needed to be intensely lemony, and savoury lemon tasting, like lemon roasted potatoes, almost pungently lemony.

The first attempt made a nice hummus, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t the hummus I was looking for. The juice of a lemon, plus the zest, just wasn’t lemony enough. It was good but not right, a hummus worth eating but not posting about. The garlic helped, but it wasn’t the hummus that was in my mind’s eye. (Mind’s tongue? It was more of an idea of flavor than an idea of sight, but I digress…) We ate the hummus up and I went along pondering about how I could impart to hummus a lemony flavor more intensely lemony than a lemon.

And then it came to me: preserved lemons! The preserved lemons of Moroccan cuisine, salty, aromatic, pungent and intensely lemony. That was the flavor I was looking for! And it went into hummus just right, just the way I had imagined that lemon hummus to be.

Today, I come with two recipes. One for preserved lemons, and one for lemon hummus.

Preserved Lemons

(recipe adapted from Bryan at Armchair Chef)

Ingredients

8 lemons

7 Tbsp kosher salt

3 Tbsp sugar

olive oil to cover

Directions

• Blanch 4 of the 8 lemons in a pot of boiling water five minutes.
• While waiting for the blanched lemons to cool, juice the other four lemons and pour the juice into a clean jar.
• When the lemons that were blanched are cool enough to handle, cut them into 8 wedges each, longitudinally.  Remove any seeds that may be present, trying to maintain the integrity of the slices.
• Toss the sliced lemons with the salt and sugar in a bowl, and then transfer them into the jar of lemon juice.
• Seal the jar and put it on the counter, or another location you will pass often, so that over the next few days you can give the contents of the jar a good tumble as you pass by.
• Once the peel of the lemons has gone soft, they are ready to use, pour the olive oil over the preserved lemons so that it covers them with a thin layer. Keep them in the fridge until you’re ready to use them!

Good Lemon Hummus

Ingredients

1-24 oz can of chickpeas

1/4 Cup extra virgin olive oil

1/4 Cup tahini

2 cloves of garlic

4 slices of preserved lemon (that equates to half a lemon worth of preserved lemon)

cracked black pepper

Directions

• This step is very important if you are using canned chickpeas. Drain the can into a colander and rinse like mad! I find they taste pretty weird if not rinsed. So, as you rinse, the protein matrix of the water they were canned in will cause there to be bubbles in the chickpeas. Rinse until there are no more bubbles in the colander and you will have tasty chickpeas instead of weird ones.
• 
• Put everything into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth! If you like your hummus a little bit on the thinner side, add upwards of a half cup of water and continue to process. It’s ready in a snap!

Serve your hummus with pita slices and veggies, or use it as a spread for layering into sandwiches. It’s so tasty!

Tags: chickpeas, hummus, lemon, lemon hummus, preserved lemons