Trader Joe's Hummus Dip

This is definitely not a new Trader Joe's product; I find reviews of it online going back several years. Yet somehow I had never noticed it, even when I went through a period of deliberately trying to sample every hummus TJ's had to offer. Nina bought it and served it for an appetizer before a dinner at her house, which then led me to buy a tub for myself.

Let's first talk about the product name, with that suspicious word "dip" in it. Why is that there? In 2015 TJ's had one called "Freshly Made Original Hummus Dip." It boasted of having no tahini, and I speculated that that was the reason TJ's was fudging on the name and not straight-up calling it "hummus." But this one definitely has tahini and yet still gets the "dip" label. I don't see anything in the list of ingredients that is out of the ordinary for hummus. I have no good explanation for why this is a "dip." Maybe it's just to catch the attention of people who don't know what to do with hummus, but will understand what a "dip" is.

There's nothing special about it as hummus. It's just middle-of-the-road, plain stuff. I had the odd reaction of initially liking it at Nina's house, then not much caring for the tub I bought for myself. Perhaps that was due to the difference in chips used to scoop it up with.

I mentioned to Nina that I didn't like it as much as either the Cedars Zesty Lemon (for which Nina and I share a fondness), or the Whole Foods store brand lemon-flavored, which is a close knockoff of the Cedars. (And, as I've mentioned several time before, both of those take a back seat, in my view, to a couple of the heavily flavored varieties of the outstanding Roots Hummus, a local Asheville product, now distributed almost nationwide. But those are so far removed from plainer hummus that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.) She pointed out that I could just add some lemon juice myself. So I did--and it greatly improved it, to the point that I liked it just as much as my other two go-to lemony ones.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It's OK as is, bumped up to excellent by stirring in some extra lemon juice. And it's cheap!



Addendum, 12/10/19: Washington Post says that this won its 11-way taste test of store brands of hummus.