Tuesday, May 3, 2011

hummus with lamb


If you are looking for traditional lamb and hummus then this page will not help you. If you are looking for the sorts of things that you can get away with and still come close or possibly exceed, then do, read on.

Garbanzo beans (chickpeas) and brown rice are ground to powder with peppercorn and sea salt in an electric coffee mill. The combined powder is seasoned further and cooked in double the volume of chicken broth along with miso paste and peanut butter to produce a wet mixture its viscosity verging on that of a sauce. 

A lamb patty of combined meat and seasoning is fried in a pan. 

An egg is fried in the same pan. 

Aerogarden lemon basil to top.






Now I ask you, where else are you going to see this? Nowhere! And I wonder, why not? This technique, a kitchen hack of my own invention, and if it has already been invented then excuuuUUUUUUUUUuuuse me, has seemingly infinite variations. Any legume or grain can be treated this way, seasoned by any means imaginable, and brought to a wide range of consistencies. The resulting paste can be poured into an oiled form or onto a flat surface, chilled, then cut and served directly or fried, deep fried, or baked or broiled. The powder can be used to make crackers, added to breads, thicken soup, included in meat-loafs for texture and to retain fat while contributing their own alimentary salubrious elements. The beauty is twofold: 1) the powder is instant. 2) the entire seed or grain or legume is used, so all of its nutrients retained and all of its fiber that is usually lost to processing.  


Ordinarily hummus will have lemon, garlic, onion, tahini, and olive oil. It will be limited to chickpeas. Hummus will also have cumin, one of my favorite spices, but I left it out here because -- what, do you think I'm insane

I just now read online several commenters state flatly that tahini tastes nothing at all like peanut butter. This does not comport with my experience, and I would like to box it out with those commenters until one of us falls down bloody, but what would be the point in reacting violently? I have tried three different brands, and by my assessment, all three brands tasted nearly exactly like peanut butter. Almost indistinguishable. In this I am disappointed because I hoped for it to taste like sesame seeds taste. I even made my own tahini twice, once using non-hulled seeds and the second time using hulled seeds. They both tasted nearly exactly like peanut butter. For the record, the non-hulled seeds, that is, seeds with their hulls still on, absorbed so much olive oil that it became mostly olive oil by weight. The seeds kept absorbing and absorbing and absorbing until eventually it was ridiculous so I switched to water then it absorbed that ridiculously too. So the moral of the story is ... ¿ Weirdly, the tahini made from non-hulled seeds was more fully nut tasting than the tahini processed from hulled seeds.

South River miso added here only because I haven't had any miso for awhile. It is almost as if my body suggested it and not my mind. There I was, tasting the brown sludge in the pot for possible adjustments and it seemed to be already perfectly fine. There was no addition whereby I could actually improve the taste. I considered all the customary hummus ingredients but rejected them one by one because either the element was already in the lamb or because I didn't feel like it, then BLAM! Just like that, the idea for peanut butter and miso appeared in my mind like a picture enhanced by an audio specialist. 

Now. I ask you again, where are you ever going to see miso mixed with hummus? In a miso recipe book? No, you will not see it there. 


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