Bacon Hummus
I get the daily e-mail updates from Stone Brewing and their brewpub, which includes the daily specials. Every day they have a “hummus of the day”, which I find very odd. Often, these are variations on classic hummus, but more often than not they are bizarre abominations that I can’t wrap my brain around. Well, The Limey and I have made fun of this many times and he once suggested ham hummus, which upon further discussion between us, became bacon hummus. Finally, after many months of thinking about and discussing this mythic concoction, I decided to make bacon hummus for the Memorial Day Cook-in (it’s like a cookout in the respect that you grill food outside on a grill, but all social activity is inside a dark living room on a beautiful spring day).
I’m sure that you’re thinking this is some sort of over the top, profane concoction where an excessive amount of bacon is thrown into the food processor with chickpeas to form some sort of bizarre bacon/bean vomit inspiring paste. Rest assured, bacon hummus is nothing of the sort, nor does it utilize fake bacon flavoring. What I came up with was a way of infusing the hummus with bacony goodness without straying too far from the basic hummus recipe (which I got from Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything“). How does one do that with such a non-traditional ingredient? Two words: bacon grease. That’s right folks, I substituted bacon grease for some of the olive oil used in my hummus. I also decided to use a little hot sauce to add further complexity to this smoky concoction. I didn’t go for a lot of hot sauce, because I didn’t want the heat to overpower the star of this dish. Since you have to make bacon in order to have bacon grease, I garnished the top of the hummus with crispy bacon crumbles.
I learned when I was telling my friends of my plan, that hummus was some sort of honored vegetarian dish. I didn’t realize that. I have always thought of it as a really delicious dip that happens to not have meat in it, that is no more an iconic vegetarian dish than french onion dip. I did not intend for this to be a big “fuck you” to the vegetarians, but some say it is. Oh well.
The most important question is “how was it?” Well, I’ll tell you, it was outfrigginstanding! It was subtle, smoky, spicy, and subversive. The hotsauce and the subtle sweet smokiness from the bacon fat played well with the classic flavors we all know and love in our hummus.
The recipe is as follows:
6-8 strips of cooked bacon*
1 can of chickpeas
1/2 cup tahini, with some of its oil if you like
1/4 cup rendered bacon fat (if you didn’t render that much when making the bacon top up with olive oil) plus olive oil for garnish
2 cloves garlic, peeled, or to taste Juice of 1 lemon, plus more as needed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Hot sauce to taste (I went with somewhere around two teaspoons of Sriracha)
1. Put the chickpeas, tahini, bacon fat/olive oil, garlic, hot sauce, and lemon juice in a food processor (or a blender for even smoother hummus), sprinkle with salt and pepper, and begin to process; add water as needed to produce a smooth purée.
The chickpeas contemplate their fate
2. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding more salt, pepper, or lemon juice as needed. Serve, drizzled with some olive oil and sprinkled bacon crumbles.
Mouth-watering
* I use the oven fry method for making bacon. Basically, you crank up the oven to 400 degrees, lay your bacon in some sort of oven safe pan and let it cook for somewhere around 10-15 minutes. This method renders a good deal of fat and doesn’t require all the flipping of cooking on the stove top.
A delicious piggy payload
Category: News and events
June 18th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Kudos on the oven-fry method. Requires a keen eye because it can be delicious at 14.2 minutes and crispy-burnt crappy at 14.4, but it really does get the best results for firm, chewy bacon.
Damn, now I want to go home and oven-fry a pound of bacon for lunch.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I have to admit, Chris, your bacon hummus was delish and I usually don’t like hummus!
June 18th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Thank you for this!!! That bacon hummus is like crack. It may even be illegal in a few states. Keep ‘em comin’. You are a culinary genius. I always enjoy reading your posts. Wow!
June 18th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
You can class thus up with pancetta instead of bacon.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:33 am
We cook our bacon in the oven all the time. I got the idea from Ina Garten. It’s no-mess if you line the sheet pan with foil and you don’t have to stand over the hot stove, flipping the slices and dodging the popping grease. We put a cooling rack on top of the foil and then lay the strips on the rack - the fat drips off into the pan. We can only do 9 or 10 slices at a time on one pan, though. That’s enough for me, so we have to make another pan for Ron.
Bacon rocks.
No matter how much we cook, it never seems to be enough.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:36 am
Bacon hummus sounds amazing. It would probably go great as a topping to my ground lamb falafel!
October 28th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
I think this is a great idea! And meh, while I respect vegetarians and I enjoy a lot of vegetarian food, they really don’t have ownership of hummus. What I find ironic is that the same cultures to which hummus is traditional typically abstain from pork! The combination just seems so mind-blowingly good, though.