Saturday, June 25, 2016

angry Korean hummus!


I finally did it, and it wasn't that hard: I made fusion hummus without tahini! A can of chick peas, a teaspoon of fresh-ground garlic, a heaping tablespoon of gochujang, and a good bit of sesame oil that serves as a tahini substitute.

Result: fuckin' WOW!

Fusion food in Korea tends to be either spectacularly good (budae-jjigae) or spectactularly awful (pretty much all other peninsular attempts at fusion). I'll stick this one in the "good" category, thanks—the gochujang, which I've used instead of the regular (and optional) chili flakes that one normally dumps into hummus, added a savor and sweetness that hummus doesn't normally have. The sesame oil acted the way I thought it would act: it made me forget all about the missing tahini (tahini is normally essential to hummus).

I had thought about making this for a long, long time, and tonight, I finally went ahead and did it. I have all sorts of ideas for how to use this spread, which straddles both Korean and Middle Eastern flavor profiles. Stay tuned as I try to bring some of these ideas to life over the coming weeks and months!

ADDENDUM: I'm not the first to think of this, but hey—I invented it independently, which makes me the Leibniz to all these other Newtons.


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