Well, I'll be. Yes, in fact I have been making hummus for a few weeks now with peanut butter when I couldn't get the sesame seeds to grind. OK, so while I'm confessing the weird hummuses (hummi? lol) I've been experimenting with, here are three others:
1. A random unknown person told me that the secret to making awesome hummus is NOT to use tehina at all, but instead to grind the sesame and the chickpeas together. The person basically suggested that you grind all the ingredients together at once.
It was doing this in a food processor that left the sesame seeds very poorly ground. So then I tried grinding the sesame seeds alone, and found indeed that they don't grind very well in my food processor. Which is what led me to try pan-toasting them.
On this subject, still, I ask: do people here find that they can grind sesame seeds in a food processor and make smooth hummus? I'm trying to understand if my problem is that I shouldn't be using a food processor, or if I should just be using a much better one. What **do** people grind their sesame seeds with to produce a smooth paste?
2. Actually, I ALSO tried the mortar and pestle route. But unfortunately, the Tel Aviv ghetto I live in seems to sell two kinds of mortar-and-pestles (or is that mortars and pestles). One of them has both mortar and pestle made of wood; the other is a much larger affair ( I believe it's African perhaps?) and it's made of fired glazed clay!! Back in the old country (which for me is Chappaqua, N.Y. USA), these things were made of stone. But techina is not a food that the natives of Chappaqua (neither the original indigenous population, nor the Quakers that replaced them in the 18th century, nor the Jews and former Presidents who replaced the Quakers) make. So: what kind of mortar and pestle do I need to make smooth tehina?
3. In my quest to try "something", I made my last batch of hummus with pan-roasted BLACK sesame seeds. Suprisingly enough, the result was ..... black hummus. Well, dark charcoal grey hummus. It was VERY good, although it was somewhat creepy. If you can use some black in your (non-burnt) food, give it a try.
(About peanut butter being American: I made some black hummus using half black sesame seeds and half peanuts, and the people I served it too all thought that it "tasted Asian.")
I have attached to this post a picture of the hummus made with half black sesame seeds and half peanuts (that is, I ground the cooked chickpeas together with the amount of (peanuts + black sesame ) I would have used to make the tehina paste I would have used to make humus (if I were a normal person). The stuff made without peanuts is even blacker.