Baba Ghanoush and Hummus

Let’s stick with the food theme from my last post and get into some serious dips: specifically, the Middle Eastern classics baba ghanoush and hummus. Middle Eastern food tends to be strongly flavoured and able to be served as finger-food. These qualities make it a natural choice for casual parties, and I rarely throw a party without at-least one of these dips. Sadly, the commercial renditions tend to be timid things, often leaving out key ingredients, for fear of challenging people’s palates. Happily, however, they are easy to make at home.

My family has no Middle Eastern heritage, but my father has always been a big fan of the region’s cuisine, and it was he that taught me the recipes that follow. I’m sure that leaves me open to criticism over the “authenticity” of my recipes. But since recipes vary from one town to the next even in the regions where they were first developed, with each town claiming to have the original and authentic recipe, and since I base my recipes on what tastes good, rather than adherence to canon, I couldn’t care less.

Basing recipes on what tastes good (and allowing for differences in the flavour and intensity of fresh produce) makes it impossible to talk in absolute proportions. To make them really well you really have to know what you want the final product to taste like and tweak the recipe as you go, rather than using strict proportions from a recipe. I’ll try my best to explain how to reach the flavour I strive for as we go.

Baba Ghanoush

Otherwise known, according to Wikipedia, as baba ganoush, baba ghannouj or baba ghannoug (Arabic: بابا غنوج).

Ingredients:

• Some eggplants (aubergines)
• Some tahini (sesame paste, one of the ingredients often omitted entirely from commercial recipes)
• Some lemons
• Some garlic
• Some salt
• Some olive oil

I’m being deliberately vague here, but for some wild ballpark figures, reckon on about one clove of garlic, one lemon and 50g of tahini for a medium-sized eggplant.

Method:

1. Roast eggplants in a 230°C oven. Remember to prick them with a fork first, or there is likely to be an almighty “POOMPH!” at some point, and you’ll find an empty eggplant shell in your oven, with the contents drooping down through the wire rack. Trust me on this.
2. Once the eggplants are sad, collapsed remnants of their former selves, take them out of the oven and allow them to cool a little. When they’re safe to handle, slit the withered skins open and scrape out the contents into a bowl, taking care to collect the large amount of liquid that will inevitably spill out.
3. Throw in all the other ingredients and purée with a stab-mixer. Okay, that’s not really fair – I’ll try to explain how I go about getting the proportions right:
   1. Blend garlic cloves into the eggplant guts in the bowl one at a time, tasting after each addition. You’re finished when you can taste a definite garlic hit, but still appreciate the smoky roasted-eggplant flavour.
   2. Blend in tahini, a dollop at a time. You’re done when you can taste the earthy, slightly bitter tahini but still appreciate the smoky eggplant and the garlic. The colour should lighten significantly.
   3. Gradually blend in the lemon juice. You should be starting to get the point by now: keep adding the juice until smoky eggplant, aromatic garlic, earthy and bitter tahini and lemon are all in balance.
   4. Add a little olive-oil, just a splash for each eggplant. This is entirely optional – the hint of olive flavour adds a little complexity, complimenting the eggplant and tahini, and it gives the dip a slightly richer texture.
   5. Add plenty of salt, a little at a time. Keep going until you think “this might be a tiny bit too salty” – it’ll settle down over time. Often, if I have this dip in the fridge overnight, I find it needs a little extra salt and lemon-juice the next day.

You might need to iterate through step 3 a few times to get everything in balance. Eggplant will be the major component by volume, but I don’t make this as an eggplant dip with tahini, garlic and lemon flavourings, instead I try to reach a point where none of the four main flavours dominates over the others. You can also crush the garlic and use a masher instead of a stab mixer to get a chunkier consistency, but I prefer the creamy, puréed style.

Hummus

Otherwise known, according to Wikipedia, as hamos, homos, houmous, hommos, hommus, hummos or hummous (Arabic: حمّص).

The recipe, or at-least my recipe, for hummus is fundamentally the same as the one for baba ghanoush, but with chickpeas in place of eggplant. If you use canned chickpeas you can start at step 3 above. I use dry chickpeas because I believe suffering makes food taste better. Here’s how I prepare them:

1. Place chickpeas in a pot (don’t fill the pot more than around half-way).
2. Add water to around twice the depth of the chickpeas.
3. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Add water if necessary to keep the chickpeas covered.
4. Leave for 12 hours or so. You can generally just turn off the heat and let them sit on the stove – no great harm will come to them.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4, if you’ve got the time, otherwise you’ll just need to cook them a little longer in step 6. You can even skip step 4 altogether, but it will take a lot of boiling to get the job done.
6. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Pick out a chickpea and slice it in half. If there’s a lighter, chalky section in the middle, keep on boiling, with extra water if necessary.
7. Once the chickpeas are cooked through to the middle, drain them, setting aside the liquid, and blend with a stab mixer. Add the liquid back a little at a time until you reach a dip-ish sort of consistency – you may need to add extra water.

I usually start cooking the chickpeas one evening, give them another boil the following morning, then a final blast on the second evening to finish them off. As with baba ghanoush, I like to create a smooth purée that isn’t dominated by any one of the constituent flavours. From that point you can also experiment with additional flavours – a handful of basil leaves blended in makes for a particularly nice basil hummus.

So there you are, two delicious, easy-to-make dips – no excuses for buying the commercial versions now. The key to both dips is tahini, which transforms the base ingredients into something far more complex and wonderful. As a bonus recipe, illustrating tahini’s transformative power, here is the dip with which my girlfriend recently wowed her colleagues at a work morning-tea: add a dollop of tahini to a small bowl of natural yoghurt and stir. That is all.