You don't have to take a lot of time to make excellent hummus, but it can help in the final product. The key to smooth hummus? A good food processor. The key to great, amazing, silky, ethereal hummus? A tamis.

A tamis, also known as a drum sieve, is a pretty esoteric piece of kitchen equipment and you can substitute a wire strainer and, really, you don't need to do anything after it comes out of the food processor if you don't want to. But if you are willing to invest the time and effort in forcing your hummus (or, really any puree from mashed potatoes to bean dip) through a strainer, you will be doing your guests a favor as it is impossible to achieve the silky smooth texture a strainer provides.

Like a lot of times I have posted here, I don't really have a recipe for hummus. What I have is a list of ingredients that you can portion out however you like to emphasize flavors you like. Also, I will suggest a few add-ins that will allow to to take one batch of hummus and allow you to make multiple flavors to serve side-by-side.

You will need the following ingredients:

Cooked garbanzo beans (you can use canned or dried beans that you have soaked and cooked yourself)

Tahini (sesame paste)

Abused garlic (I abuse mine with a microplane grater)

Salt

Olive oil

Fresh Lemon juice

Harissa/aleppo peppers/cayenne or some other type of hot pepper that you enjoy

Technique:

Start with just the garbanzo beans and just puree the bejesus out of them. Now add a tablespoon of tahini, a clove of abused garlic, a dollop of olive oil, some salt, a little bit of the pepper of your choice and a healthy squeeze of lemon. Whiz it all up in the processor until it's smooth and combined. Now, taste it and see if it needs more of something. If you like a lot of garlic, add more. If you like it spicier, add more harissa. My wife adores lots of lemon, so I usually make it lemony for her. Just keep tasting, whizzing and tasting (that might have come out wrong, about whizzing and tasting, but you know what I mean) until you get the flavors as you like them. Some people add water to help achieve the correct consistency, but I prefer using my best olive oil to help keep things smooth. Once you have it where you like it, you have hummus.

But it doesn't have to stop there. You can make roasted red pepper hummus by simply adding some roasted red pepper and whizzing that up. Or cilantro. Or parsley. Your imagination is your limit but try to avoid combining all your flavors at once. Make a batch of roasted red pepper hummus and a separate batch of cilantro hummus. Serve them side-by-side and notice the subtle differences in color.

Now, if you really want to go that extra mile, this is where you force everything through a tamis or a wire sieve. It will take some time, but your hummus will be the smoothest emulsion you have ever had. I will admit that I don't usually go through this extra step, but when I do, it's always a crowd-pleaser.  If you use a small wire strainer, this will take you a long time and you just keep using the back of a spoon to force the hummus through the strainer.  Keep forcing and scraping and you will have the silkiest, smoothest hummus you've ever had.  I really recommend a tamis for this (you can find them at restaurant supply stores) and all you need to do is use a plastic bench scraper to force the hummus throuh the tamis, but the strainer can work if you need it to.  Just plan way ahead and don't blame me when you need a fistful of ibuprofen that will allow you to open the fist you used to hold the spoon.