Houmous in all its varieties

Having recently written about "Beans on Toast", I suddenly realized that one of my favourite sandwiches is a Middle Eastern version of beans on toast: Houmous in Pitta Bread! There used to be a sandwich truck that came around my place of work to sell sammys (is that British slang? No, I looked it up on the internet [i.e. I googled it]* and all sorts of people claim it: Sicilians, Americans, and the DownUnders spell it sammie).

I gained quite a lot of weight eating plain houmous pittas or houmous & falafel pittas every day. That's why I don't eat sandwiches anymore...

Meanwhile, the varieties of houmous** sold in the UK are skyrocketing.*** We can get houmous flavoured with red pepper, roasted red pepper, caramelised onion, pesto, lemon & coriander, sweet chilli, jalapeno (without the tilde), garden herb, broad bean & asparagus, piri piri (hot chilli), or using Italian, Moroccan or Indian spices.

By official-ish definition, houmous is centred around mashed chick peas and tahini. However, though containing neither, the broad bean & asparagus item mentioned above was labelled 'houmous'. It appears that sometimes 'houmous' is just a term embracing a wide range of mashed legume 'dip' products in similar-shaped containers, intended for dipping raw veggies etc. The newest addition to this product range is correctly not referred to as houmous. This is Edamame Bean & Wasabi Dip, from Sainsbury's. Is contents are 26% soybeans, 15% peas, and spinach – the green elements. Wasabi powder claims 1%.

I wonder at the name, though. Edamame in Japanese are soybeans in the pod. Boiled in salty water, they make good beer snacks by sucking out the beans from the pod. The name of this product suggests the pods are ground up into the dip. That would have pleased my father, who once ate a whole plate of edamame, pods and all. You should have seen the look on the waitress's face as she glanced around to find the discarded pods to dispose of. Absolute puzzlement, then astonishment ("You ate them all???").

Back to houmous, the edamame dip is lovely, so it will join Moroccan and lemon & coriander on the shopping list as our favourites. Wonder what they will come up with next....

* I hate it when I ask someone about something and the first thing they say is "Google it". If I'd wanted to google it, I would have done it already, but I want the easy answer...by asking the person next to me when the question arises.

**There are a lot of spellings of houmous on the internet (yes, I googled it). I'll go with Sainsbury's spelling since that's where I buy it. The 'ou' must be British English, like 'favourite', 'labour'; but those words just add a 'u'. Here an 'o' is added, otherwise we'd spell it 'hummus' like the ever-reliable Wikipedia does...

***Ha, ha, ha, I scooped the Daily Mail on this topic, by one day. See Amanda Cable's column on "Dippy about houmous" in the Saturday October 15th issue. Since it's longer than my blog, it has more info – interesting!