Vegan MoFo Day 19 - Tidy-up Thursdays - Mung beans for Hummus

In the past two weeks Tidy-up Thursdays has involved an obscure flour and some old tinned produce which had past it's prime. This week it was time to play with a legume so I selected the most neglected one in my pantry - mung beans. At the moment my pantry is home to 14 different varieties of dried lentils and beans - black beans, pinto beans, red kidney beans, brown lentils, black lentils (urad dal), yellow split peas, red lentils, chickpeas, puy lentils, cannellini beans, soy beans, black eyed beans, Egyptian broad beans and mung beans. That's a lot of legumes! Most of them are used fairly regularly but I haven't been game to use mung beans since my fellows took a dislike to everything I made with them.

To be fair I didn't experiment with them broadly enough and only tried them in a handful of Indian curries. Curries are generally hits rather than misses so it was a bit disheartening that I was the only person enjoying these cute little green legumes. The mung beans were relegated out of sight next to the black eyed beans which are my least favourite. A recipe for Mung bean hummus posted on 101 Cookbooks caught my eye a few months back - there are heaps of different hummus recipes around using so many types of legumes but this was the first one I had seen using mung beans.

Mung beans are a lot easier to prepare than chickpeas as they don't require to be pre-soaked and only take around 30 minutes of cooking to soften so this hummus was pretty easy to whip up from scratch. Heidi's version didn't include cumin but I added some to mine and only used around half the amount of tahini as I was almost out of it. I also made a slightly larger quantity as I had cooked up a very big batch of mung beans. 

   

My fellows were none the wiser when I presented them with this hummus. They could tell that it was different to my standard chickpea hummus yet they had no idea what the secret ingredient was. It did have a slightly earthy flavour although it didn't taste anything like the mung beans we had eaten in the past. The hummus was spread on homemade pita bread along with falafels from Oasis Bakery that had been sitting in the freezer for a while to make falafel wraps. The remainder of the hummus disappeared rapidly mopped up with more pita bread and some baby carrots that had been pulled up from the garden. As this was so successful and I still have lots of cooked mung beans in the fridge I'll be whipping up another batch in the next day or two. Veganosaurus wrote a helpful post about sprouting mung beans a couple of weeks ago which is something I would like to try in the future too.

Mung Bean Hummus (Adapted from 101 Cookbooks)

2 cups cooked mung beans
1/4 - 1/2 cup tahini
3 tablespoons lemon juice
3/4 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 large garlic clove, roughly chopped
1/2 cup (or more) water
olive oil, sliced spring onions and smoked paprika, for garnish

Place the cooked mung beans in a food processor and process on high speed until the beans have broken down into a coarse mixture. Add the tahini, lemon juice, salt, cumin, garlic clove and 1/4 cup of water into the food processor bowl and continue processing. Add 1/4 cup of water (or more) slowly while the food processor is running until the hummus reaches the consistency you are happy with.

Spoon the mixture into a serving bowl and garnish with olive oil, spring onions and smoked paprika.