For Restaurant-Quality Hummus, Pay More Attention To This Ingredient

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When a recipe only calls for a few ingredients, those ingredients really have to work the way you want them to. For restaurant-quality hummus, the chickpeas must be soft enough to blend to a velveteen smoothness, the extra virgin olive oil must imbue the blend with its own silken fat, the garlic must add its low, pungent heat, lemon juice must brighten it all up, and salt and pepper must fulfill their general flavor-enhancing destinies. And you'll notice that a lot of restaurant-style hummus recipes don't skimp on the tahini, either.

A creamy paste derived from sesame seeds, tahini brings a nutty warmth to every recipe it touches. And it pairs so well with chickpeas that you needn't be shy about their coupling. Tanoreen, an excellent Levantine restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, for example, uses 300 grams of tahini for every 400 grams of canned chickpeas (among other ingredients). If that sounds like a lot more than the dash you're used to, it's time to cut loose, go overboard, and just add more tahini to your hummus for goodness' sake.

Overmixing ruins your baked goods, but with hummus, you have a pretty forgiving margin of error for your à la minute ingredient edits. In fact, blending your hummus longer can actually improve its texture. So you can start slow, increasing your usual tahini proportion by about 25%, mixing in some more, tasting, and increasing to whatever degree you wish.

As long as you're breaking out the small appliances, tahini is super-fast and easy to make from scratch by blending toasted sesame seeds and olive oil. But there are also plenty of store-bought varieties to try, including Al Wadi Tahina, which is available online as well as in trusted brick and mortar Middle Eastern markets like NYC's Sahadi's. Once opened, tahini will likely last up to six months in the refrigerator. But you'll likely find plenty of other ways to use it up long before then — for example, tahini can enhance your cookies and other goodies.