Hummus: is it Israeli or Arab?
Most Israelis, and many people around the world, believe hummus to be an Israeli dish. On the other hand, when they want to eat good hummus, most Israelis will go to an Arab hummus place. So how invented it? Who does hummus belong to?
If you’d tell a Syrian, a Palestinian or an Israeli Arab, that hummus is an Israeli dish, they will probably laugh at your face. Hummus is eaten all over the middle-east, and is a part of the traditional Arab kitchen. There’s no way it was brought here by European Jews…
This does sound reasonable, although chickpeas are known to man for at least 9000 years. The Greeks loved it and the Romans made various dishes with it. Technically, the first documented use of chickpeas to make hummus is from the time of the crusaders, and it took place in ancient Israel.
True, the use of chickpeas to make a traditional dish called “Hamitz” was mentioned in the Talmud, some 700 years earlier. Read more
The primitive American hummus culture
Though relatively young and poor in content compared with it’s older Hebrew brother, The Hummus Blog is getting lots of attention these days. Over the comments at one of the sites who talked about us, someone said something like “Americans don’t know shit about hummus”.
Hummus nutritional value: dried vs. canned chickpeas
Canned and preserved foods are not as healthy. Specifically, when using canned chickpeas instead of dried ones to make hummus, you loose half the nutrients.
Most of the recipes for homemade hummus found on the web, are based on canned chickpeas (a.k.a garbanzo beens). To those of you who are acquainted with the original flavor of hummus (not the industrial type, that is), this probably sound like a but idea. True, the use of canned peas demands less effort, but it doesn’t taste that good.
For those of you who see think canned chickpeas are a reasonable substitute, I collected some data about the nutritional differences between cooked dried chickpeas and canned ones.
Read more
Humus Recipe II
We have an easy recipe that will teach you how to make humus and hummus and houmous! Three for the price of one, which is for free.
In the hummus blog, we prefer to spell our favorite dish with double m’ (hummus). This is also the correct spelling as far as we can tell. The problem is, many people spell it “humus” when looking us in the search engines. So, if you got here looking for a “humus recipe”, click this link: Humus Recipe.
If you link to it, save it as a favorite, or comment about it in your blog (please do!) you can call it “a humus recipe” or “a hummus recipe”. And if you want to be a real saint, you can even give us two links: one pointing here, saying “humus recipe” and the other to the “hummus recipe” page.
This may seem to you as no more then a boring technicality, but spelling issues are (almost) everything when it comes to building a successful community. And this blog, by all means, is intended to create a flourishing online hummus community, the first of it’s kind.
In order to archive that, we shell of course have to merge all the sub-communities created by different spellings, such as houmous, homous, humous, chumus, hoomoos, and god knows what else. Thanks for your kind help.
E-mail updates
The hummus SHOP
Buy tahini, chickpeas, olive oil, falafel mix., halva & more.
Please vote for us
-
