It’s big, it’s round, it’s covered in powdered sugar, and it’s filled with…
humous? This Hanukka, forget the regular strawberry jam-filled tasteless dough
and sink your teeth into something unique: the humous-filled “Jerusalem
sufganiya.”
The concoction was conceived as a unique Israeli-Arab
culinary collaboration to celebrate the festival of lights, with activists from
Youth for Jerusalem working with Arab vendors from the Old City on
Monday.
RELATED:Bet Shemesh man on annual Hanukka-donut binge for charity “We do a lot of activities with vendors in the Old City and the
residents,” said Hila Zisberg, the head of Youth for Jerusalem.
“They
said to us, hey, it’s almost Hanukka, let’s do something together,” she
explained.
Those who doubted the combination of humous and sufganiyot
were pleasantly surprised.
“Sometimes, working together with the vendors
doesn’t just bring good ideas, it brings tasty ones as well,” said
Zisberg.
On Monday, activists and vendors prepped hundreds of doughnuts
and squirted humous into them outside of the Tower of David in the Old City,
working on vendor Ischak Canaan’s rolling cart. A bakery in the Old City donated
the doughnuts, and another vendor donated the humous.
Tourists and
soldiers jumped to try the doughnuts, said Zisberg.
A tour group of South
Koreans was the most enthusiastic, and the hundreds of doughnuts were gone in
less than 90 minutes.
The mere thought of a sweet sufganiya filled with
savory humous turns many a stomach, but Zisberg said there was one secret that
made the special sufganiyot not just palatable, but popular: the high-quality
humous.