I learned this technique years ago when I first attempted this recipe from smitten kitchen for ethereally smooth hummus. I had never cooked with chickpeas before at that point in my life, and so the whole structure of the legume was alien to me. If you read through the instructions from the recipe, Deb from smitten kitchen implores that taking the skins off the chickpeas is the critical and rewarding part of the recipe. It’s true! But it’s also really cumbersome and takes a lot of effort.
I learned a somewhat more advanced version of this technique from attending a hummus-making workshop with a Syrian-Canadian chef over the holidays, where she said that after cooking the chickpeas you should get the chickpeas in a large bowl of cool water, and stick both hands in to agitate and to move them around.
If you do it right with the appropriate soaking and cooking times, what you’ll find is that you can get most of the skins off en masse real quick, and if you’re keen to get all the skins off, you can go in and pop them off one by one like I show in the video.
In most cases, I’m quite happy with starting a hummus when most, but not all, of the skins are off. I don’t always need an ethereally smooth hummus, and sometimes a bit of the extra fiber isn’t bad to have.
Make your chickpeas buttery smooth