Homemade Hummus Recipe

Good Evening!

Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday, I was feeling a little under the weather over the weekend and got a little behind on writing! It's the first one I've skipped after being back for 2 weeks though so I'm pretty pleased with myself. :)

Today I wanted to share with you a recipe we've been using over the last few days to make our own hummus! We've been going through 3-4 tubs a week since I moved over, dipping carrot sticks and apple slices (seriously, apple in lemon hummus is amazing) on an almost daily basis, so it was getting expensive. £1.80 for 2 from Tesco was easily approaching a £15/month habit! Having made hummus in the past I knew we could cut down on the price and have a much healthier product to boot so off to the shops I went.

For our first batch the plan was to keep it simple and go for a lemon and garlic hummus, plus I'd looked up a tahini recipe and decided to make our own there too as it would be even more cost effective.

Your shopping list will look like this:

1 Can Chickpeas

Garlic

Tahini (or sesame seeds if you want to make your own)

1 Lemon

Olive Oil

Salt

Smoked Paprika (we added it at the end for some extra flavour)

The Recipe

If you're making your own tahini do that first as you'll need to wash the blender (we used one of the small chamber blenders as we're making small quantities at a time). Making it is really easy - toast the sesame seeds until they just start to brown, leave to cool and then blend with olive oil until it's a runny paste. It smells amazing!

Ingredients:

1 Can Chickpeas

1-2 Cloves of Garlic (to taste, we used 2 tsp of Lazy Garlic)

2 tsp Tahini

1/2 Lemon (or more/less to taste)

3-4 tbsp Olive Oil

Salt (to taste)

Smoked Paprika (to taste)

1. Drain the chickpeas and keep the water to one side.

2. Add all the ingredients to the blender, including ~5 tablespoons of the chickpea water.
(Note: It might be easier to add the chickpeas half at a time if you're using a small blender.)

3. Blend until smooth, adjusting consistency by adding more olive oil or chickpea water if it's too thick.

4. Taste and adjust flavour with more lemon, garlic, salt or paprika as you like!

Our first batch was quite thick which worked well for carrot sticks but not so much as a side dish with cous cous (another thing we've loved doing!). We made a second batch yesterday using lime instead of lemon and without the paprika. We made it a lot thinner and it went absolutely perfectly with Walkers Sensations Moroccan Spice & Sweet Tomato crisps (I'm currently in love with these as they're on offer for 75p at Tesco!).

Another great way to save money is to save old shop-bought hummus pots and clean them so you have perfectly sized containers to put it in! Although this recipe makes enough to fill 1 and partially fill another so you'll want a few before starting.

I've not done the official sums yet as we're still adjusting the recipe each time and finding ways to make it even cheaper (for example next time we'll be buying a giant bag of sesame seeds from Amazon to cut down on per-batch cost). That said, I've estimated that each batch is costing us about 80-90p - almost the same as the Tesco hummus but we know exactly what went into it and we get about 1/3 more with the homemade recipe, so already worth it.

Once we've finished adjusting and finding the cheapest way to make it I think we can get it down to about 75p a batch - coming in at a much more reasonable £6/month for hummus. Happy Ami and happy bank balance. :)

Have you made hummus before? What recipes do you use? I'm always looking for new ones to try! :)

Love,
Ami
xx