Sufganiyot with humous?

A unique Arab-Jewish initiative turned out better than expected.

By MELANIE LIDMAN
sufganiyot, Hannukah donuts_311 (photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
sufganiyot, Hannukah donuts_311
(photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
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.