If you take your hummus seriously, you will love this. If you don’t, stop being a Grinch. How can anyone not love hummus in all its creamy, golden glory? As it turns out, yesterday was the fourth International Hummus Day — an appropriately grandiose title for a dip that’s become ridiculously popular all over the world.
Made essentially from blending together chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, olive oil and salt, hummus comes in many guises. You can add baby spinach, cilantro or parsley to make it more nutritious. Use garlic, chillies or sun-dried tomatoes for added flavour. Try beetroot, avocado or roasted peppers to boost colour. There are versions with feta cheese, yoghurt or peanut butter for ultimate creaminess. You can even change the base from chickpeas to black beans, cannellini beans or edamame for variety.
Hummus Day, which garnered 70,000 fans on Facebook, involved eating it for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and then sharing pictures on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Enthusiasts shared recipes, including a bizarre version made with chocolate and red peppers. Pictures were posted from around the world: a Japanese hummus workshop in progress, a family in Argentina posing around a plate piled high with the dip, a New Zealander with a bucket filled with 14 litres of hummus to mark the date.
Someone confessed to having hummus with their breakfast cereal. Someone else said he named his cat ‘hummus’ as a homage to his favourite food. One man was rash enough to post, “I hate hummus” on the page, only to trigger a furious, all caps response: “And hummus hates you.”
Much ado about nothing? Well, there’s a laundry list of reasons why it’s so popular. Hummus is nutritious, tasty and versatile. It’s also easy, cheap and quick to whip up at home. Besides, how many other dips can claim to have a song on YouTube dedicated to them, with 1,185,465 views? Sung to Meghan Trainor’s ‘All about that bass,’ it goes, “Because you know I’m all about that paste.”
