The hummus was fantastic—smooth and flavorful—but I thought to myself, If I’m going to be puréeing my chickpeas anyway, why bother making the tahini paste separately? Can’t I just dump everything in the blender and hit go? I tried it out, placing the cooked chickpeas with their liquid, tahini, cumin, lemon juice, salt, and peeled garlic cloves into the blender, all at once.
I tasted the new batch and nearly had to spit it out: The sharp, hot garlic flavor was overwhelming. It tasted just like you’d expect five cups of hummus with a full head of garlic in it to taste. What the heck? How could this batch, which used the exact same ingredients as the previous batch, taste so darn different?
I knew that the hot flavors in garlic develop when the enzyme alliinase converts a mild compound called alliin into a more pungent one called allicin, and I also knew that this reaction doesn’t take place until the garlic is sliced open and cells are ruptured. It’s for this reason that you can drastically alter the flavor of garlic just by cutting it in different ways. But in my hummus, the garlic was getting fully puréed either way, so what was up?
