things wot i made then ate: hummus on pita

The impetus for this arose from the tin of chickpeas opened yesterday. Only 1/3 of the tin was used then which left 2/3 remaining in the refrigerator. What else could be done with held over chickpeas besides mixing them with a side? Season them as a stand-alone side dish, include them in a homemade soup, smash them into a dip, coat them with a batter and deep fry them, use them in a dough, include them in a mixture for biscuits, cookies, bake in a cake, introduce into a pancake batter, use as a filling for dumplings? Come to think of it, there does seem a lot of things could be done with chickpeas other than hummus, and hummus need not be chickpeas.

Had I been thinking properly, I would not have missed another opportunity to include the mild New Mexico chiles also in need of a purpose. But today I have a good excuse: I was tired. A new friend asked to borrow my carpet cleaner. It is a very good carpet cleaner, and rather expensive, worthy of borrowing and certainly lending, but I must protect my investment and there is a bit of training involved. So I went along to clean the carpet with him, instructing and supervising. If he knew how much the solution cost, he wouldn't ask such a thing, and I am loathe to mention it, but that is another matter. I must say, carpet cleaning is an exhausting business when done properly, and oi, such a carpet. It wasn't just a zippy-zap in-and-out job. This problem carpet with its countless difficult stains took hours of special attention. I am well chuffed my friend now has a clean floor.

1) Make the pita

2) Make the hummus

It wouldn't do to have a bunch of pitas around. This will be a small batch. 3/4 cup water, and even that is an excess. Usually I would simply fry the bread, now that is a very quick way to do the same thing, and I do like to watch it blister and puff in the pan, but this time I intend to bake them to see how that turns out. In the end, I learned frying is more simple, faster, more certain, uses less energy, attains better results.

The whole wheat flour used here was milled at home from grain dug out of the bins at Whole Foods. I do love those bins. They're fun. Home milling is a step in a fresh dimension, possibly a late 60's West Coast hippy dimension, I do not know for certain -- what do I look like, a social historian over here? The advantage is the result is fresh, and it is the entire grain is all ground up. Bang. There it is. It is not possible to be more truthfully 100% whole wheat than that. Unlike commercially milled whole-wheat which is separated into its constituent elements and then recombined in inexact proportions. This is the distortion of the language of industry, and stands at the heart of the hoax played on an unsuspecting public. They are attempting, and largely succeeding, to convince trusting unwary customers that when "100% whole wheat" is spoken, that it is exactly what is being offered. It is not. Yes, they have returned 100% of the types of elements that were separated out, but in proportions that suit their purpose, not in proportions to the original grain and certainly not to your sense of what the meaning of the phrase "100% whole wheat" is. (Much as the carpet cleaning industry language uses the phrase "steam cleaning." I challenged them on this. There is no steam involved, in the sense of water boiling until it vaporizes into steam, as we all understand the meaning of steam to be from our earliest science lessons about the various states of water. Nonetheless, the entire industry advertises "steam cleaning" knowing that customers logically expect actual steam. It is just very hot water. LIES!)

Olive oil and sea salt are added to the dough after the yeast is established and before the final addition of flour. This is slightly more than 1/4 whole wheat, 3/4 AP flour.

I love playing with dough. It is like Arts and Crafts, except better because you can eat it.

Dough is kind of like clay. Abuse it a bit, pound it and stretch it, roll it and smash it. It improves from rough handling. Form it into shapes, and it obeys your will. Those cells in there are living. How can they take it? The thing that amazes me is not only do they accept all that, they thrive on it.

Even this ↓ doesn't hurt them.

Or this ↓

And certainly not this ↓

See? They love it. ↓

Okay, now baking ↓ DOES hurt them.

But aren't they beautiful?

So there's that. It appears by the photographs that it all happened in sequence, and it did, but the hummus was prepared between the rising and the baking. It is certainly possible to do one then the other but that is not how this happened.

You would expect tahini to have the distinct flavor of sesame, but it tastes nearly identical to peanut butter. I wouldn't hesitate to substitute one for the other. Once I made tahini by blending sesame seeds from the bulk bins. I did not know what 'husked' meant. Did it mean the seeds were de-husked, or did it mean the seeds were still enhuskenated. (stop underling my words in red, you pissant spellchecking martinet.) Comparing the seeds side by side did not show any visible difference. So I got non-husked, which turned out to have their husks still on. When processed with an immersion blender, the husks kept absorbing the oil within the seed turning it impossibly stiff so I added olive oil. The husks absorbed that too so I added more olive oil, then more olive oil, and more olive oil, and more olive oil, and more olive oil, until finally I decided I didn't want too much olive oil. What was I, insane?

Then I went back to Whole Foods and got husked sesame seeds and did it again. That went a lot better. Even so, the tahini made with the husks still on tasted much better than any tahini I had before or since. So the moral of the story is: husks contribute significantly to the betterment of foods, and their removal if for reasons of refinement, is quite counterproductive.

Half the lemon was used for this amount and the mixture came out very lemony indeed. I like that.

Za'atar is a Middle Eastern thing. It is a mixture (like curry) that contains oregano, thyme, savory, dried sumac and salt. This one has sesame seeds. Actually, I haven't read the jar, I noticed them in there, too few to have any noticeable effect. Some hummus recipes call specifically for sumac. So that shows you to embellish your own hummus pretty much however you wish.

For the first time in my life, possibly the second, I finally learned to back off a bit from the spices. It did not even occur to me to add any type of chile powder, which seems natural for a thing like this, and I had to move half a dozen of them out of the way to get at the za'atar in the freezer door.