Mazel Tov to Jawadat Ibrahim of the Arab-Israeli village of Abu Gosh. He has created the world’s largest dish of hummus. Quite an impressive feat.

The “Hummus Wars” have been publically played for the last couple of years in the Middle East, with Lebanon and Israel as the nations who have vied for the titles of the world’s best and largest hummus dishes. Actually Lebanon and Israel debate over who may actually claim ownership of the delicious chick-pea concoction.

Abu Gosh’s hummus dish weighed in at over four tons. It included 2.5 tons of chickpeas, 1.5 of sesame paste, hundreds of freshly squeezed lemons and a vat of crushed garlic. There was so much dip, that the only “bowl” able to hold it was a satellite dish, six meters in diameter, provided by a local telecommunications company.

The Abu Gosh restaurant shattered Lebanon’s previous record, set by chefs in Beirut who last year cooked over two tons of hummus. Jawadat Ibrahim was awarded the Guinness world record for his efforts by Guinness official Jack Brookbank who was there to witness the whole thing.
Ibrahim had this to say:

“Today we competed with them and beat them…People actually call me from Lebanon on a regular basis just to say that their hummus is better…If you live in the Middle East, before you’ve learnt to talk, you’ve learnt to love hummus — so I just want the world to know that mine is the best.”

The former benchmark for the biggest bowl of hummus set by a group of 300 Lebanese chefs was intended to award Lebanon seeking approval from the European Union to register hummus as a national dish.

“What we have been trying to do is just what the Greeks have done with feta cheese,”

said Fadi Abboud, president of The Association of Lebanese Industrialists.
Abboud insists that Israeli companies are depriving Lebanese companies of huge potential earnings by exporting hummus.
Israeli hummus blogger, Shooky Galili refuted this:

“Trying to make a copyright claim over hummus is like claiming for the rights to bread or wine…Hummus is a centuries old Arab dish — nobody owns it, it belongs to the region…If you enter any good hummus restaurant in this region, you will see Jews and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis sitting at the same table, eating the same food. I think in the end this rivalry will show that we in the Middle East have far more in common than the things that divide us.”

Ibrahim, the Guinness world record winner summed up the event as such:

“The reason I’m doing this is to draw attention to the fact that I make the best hummus in Abu Gosh, and Abu Gosh has the best hummus in the world! Of course, the Lebanese will tell you something different — but competition is healthy, there is no need to bring politics into this…My dream is that after this, we can set an even bigger world record by teaming up with the Lebanese. How about 10 tons?”