Easy Homemade Hummus

The best way to nourish your body is with real whole foods. I am a huge advocate of “food as medicine” and of replacing processed, packaged food with food made from whole ingredients preferably cooked in your own kitchen.

I know everyone is busy and it’s easy to purchase ready-made meals. But I also know that once you get the hang of cooking and having the ingredients on hand, it is quick (and dare I say fun?) to throw together healthy meals that taste SO MUCH BETTER than the purchased variety.

A perfect example is hummus. My family loves the Mediterranean Hummus from Trader Joe’s. We easily have gone through three tubs in a week (I have teenagers). So when I got an InstantPot for Christmas this year, one of the first things I wanted to try was cooking chickpeas from dried and whipping up some fresh homemade hummus to see if I could recreate the TJ’s version.

In my family’s estimation this recipe is just as good, and some say better! I found that making it myself, it always comes out fluffier, not quite as dense as the store bought varieties. I decided that I quite like it that way. And the flavors are so fresh and bright. Really delicious!

You can make hummus from canned beans of course. But most canned goods have a thin plastic lining with the chemical BPA (Bisphenol-A), which has been shown to be an endocrine disruptor. That means that it mimics the estrogen hormone in your body, messing with your hormone function and has been linked to breast cancer, infertility and obesity. We don’t want to be putting anything in our bodies like that! So let’s reduce eating canned goods whenever possible.

If you don’t have an InstantPot or other pressure cooker that makes cooking beans from dry super easy, you can soak dry beans overnight and then cook them on the stove. Or as a last resort, look for canned goods that say they are BPA free, although they may simply be using BPS or BPF which are thought to be just as bad.

So onto the hummus!

I put a cup of dried garbanzo beans in 4 cups of water and a drizzle of olive oil to prevent foaming, in my InstantPot and then use half of the beans for this recipe and keep the other half in my fridge to sprinkle on salads or to use in my Caulifower Chana Masala later in the week. If you want to make more hummus, use the entire batch of garbanzo beans and double the recipe ingredients.

If you make the garbanzo beans on the weekend to have on hand, you can throw this yummy snack together in literally 5 minutes whenever you get the craving. It can be used as a spread on sandwiches as well as the traditional dip with veggies or pita wedges.

Easy and Delicious Homemade Hummus
Makes 1 cup

Ingredients
1 cup cooked garbanzo beans
2 Tbsp reserved liquid from cooked beans
3 Tbsp tahini
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice (about ½ a medium lemon)
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 large clove of fresh garlic
1 tsp sea salt
garnish: 2 sundried tomatoes in olive oil, chopped fine and 12 pine nuts

Directions
Place all ingredients (except those for garnish) in a food processor and whirl until completely creamy and fluffy, a couple of minutes generally.

Put hummus in a small serving bowl and garnish with a drizzle of olive oil, sundried tomatoes and pine nuts in the center.

Serve with toasted pita wedges for dipping and/or carrot, celery and jicama sticks. Also makes a delicious spread on a sandwich.