Yup, definitely smoother and lighter in texture. But let’s be honest: Who the heck wants to peel that many chickpeas one at a time?

There’s a much easier way to do it, for the record. Once you’ve cooked your chickpeas, transfer them to a bowl of cold water and massage them firmly between your hands. The skins should mostly slip off and start to float above the chickpeas, making them relatively easy to scoop out and dump in the compost.
Still, not having to peel them at all would be easier. It occurred to me that I might be letting my typical cook’s instincts get the better of me in this situation. I’d been cooking the chickpeas until they were perfectly creamy and intact—the way I’d want them if I were serving them whole. But in this case, what if I just went all out and cooked the out of them?

I tried it, cooking the chickpeas until they were literally falling apart—skins, flesh, and all.

I finally settled on soaking the chickpeas overnight with a little baking soda and cooking them in fresh water on the stovetop, with onions, carrots, celery, garlic, bay leaf, and some more baking soda, until tender. I then drained them, reserving a little cooking liquid to adjust the texture of the hummus.

Do You Need to Peel Dried Chickpeas for Hummus?
Read enough recipes for hummus, and you’ll start to note that those promising extra-smooth texture all have one thing in common: peeling the chickpeas before blending. Even our own Josh Bousel agreed in his recipe, finding that the tough skins were responsible for most of the lumps in lumpy hummus.

So I dutifully peeled an entire batch of chickpeas before puréeing them (…34…35…36…finally got one bite’s worth of chickpeas done!) and had some friends come over and taste them, side by side with a batch of hummus made from unpeeled chickpeas.