Update 4/7/14: Try this great tip from Smitten Kitchen and peel the garbanzo beans! It makes the hummus sooo smooth!

I’m not a huge hummus person, but my husband Tejas likes to have it around for “healthy” snacking. It is a good alternative to his favorite potato chips and Maggi Hot & Sweet Tomato Chilli Sauce! The problem is that it is hard to find a good one. I like it very smooth and am not keen on extra stuff in it. So I decided to make my own homemade hummus for the first time in a long time. It is smooth, simple, and great with pita chips, hot pita, or cut up veggies.

The can of garbanzo beans you buy really makes a difference. I am partial Indo-European garbanzo beans because they are soft and ready to go. You don’t need to cook them more to get them soft. This helps make a wonderfully smooth hummus. We get these at the Indian market down the street. I don’t know what we would do if we didn’t have an Indian market!

The next thing we used is the amazing tahini sauce from Trader Joe’s. Here is a picture of it on Cook with Susan’s blog. Oh my! Click on her easy pita recipe, they look fantastic! One day maybe I’ll try to make my own pita. I can’t imagine it coming out so delicious looking though…

The only problem with this tahini sauce is it doesn’t have a big shelf life, therefore if you don’t make hummus or Greek/Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food often, you might not get through it before it molds. I feel like I had a jar of simply tahini in the past that lasted a long time, so I might try that again, but this tahnini sauce is sooo good. I can eat it straight! Tahini is pretty hard to make from scratch. I mean you can make it or put ground sesame seeds in the hummus (I have tried), but the problem is that you can’t peel the sesame seeds like the sesame seeds in the store bought kind. So the texture is never quite as smooth and the flavor is a little different.

Okay anyways, here is the recipe…

1 can garbanzo beans with the juice (just the smaller 15 ounce can, not the 29 ounce can like the picture unless you’re making more)
2-4 tablespoons tahini sauce (this depends on how tahini-y you like it)
2 garlic cloves cut up a little
1-2 lemons (not lime) juiced (this depends on how juicy your lemons are, mine were not very good this time, so I used 2)
1 teaspoon roasted cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
Salt

• Throw all the ingredients into a food processor and blend until super smooth. That’s it!