Recipe: Crispy Chickpeas

[brin_bellway]

[cw: what it says on the tin (no pictures)]


(makes 3 servings)

Ingredients:

• 2 19oz (540mL) cans chickpeas


• ~8 glugs (total) olive oil


• Salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions:

Start preheating oven to 425°F.

Open, drain (into colander), and rinse a can of chickpeas.

Take four small sheets of paper towel, make them into two doubled-up small sheets, and lay them in an X across a medium-small bowl.

Pour the chickpeas into the lined bowl. Rub them with the paper towels to (mostly) dry them and to loosen the chickpea skins. Be a little on the rough side: some chickpeas splitting open is not a bad thing.

Remove the paper towel out from under the chickpeas so that they are now directly in the bowl. Add about four glugs of olive oil and some salt and pepper, then stir (an ordinary spoon should be fine).

Spread the chickpeas out on a foil-lined cookie sheet.

Repeat this process with the second can.

Bake for 38 minutes, shaking and rotating the pans every 10 minutes.

I'm not sure whether refrigeration is *necessary* for the leftovers or not, but that's where I've been keeping them. I have not tried to test the limits of how long they keep. Reheat in oven for about 4 minutes.

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These are:

• Tasty (at least once you get the hang of parsing the flavour; it took me about one can to acquire the taste)


• High in fibre (and protein)


• Vegan (at no point in this process do you have to handle raw meat, or even raw eggs)


• Cheap (especially by protein standards)


• Made entirely out of multi-year-shelf-stable ingredients (so you can always have plenty on hand; stock up when they're on sale to make it even cheaper!)

Variations: other seasonings (I hear paprika and sumac are popular), probably possible to work out a way to prepare both cans at once while still being able to rub them properly, soaked dried chickpeas instead of canned.

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With thanks to Alton Brown, Grace Elkus, and the folks at Goya for providing the data I needed to triangulate a recipe that gets the chickpeas crunchy but not too burnt and which does not require you to have a salad spinner.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Yeah, since I had to triangulate a few different recipes to figure out something that worked for me, I don't expect my precise recipe to work as-is for other people. I wrote this partly to inspire people to try it and act as another triangulation point, and partly as note-to-self.

At 40 minutes, some of the chickpeas were burnt. At 35 minutes, some of them weren't crunchy all the way through. At 38 minutes, a couple of them are burnt, some of them are *almost* burnt, and approximately all of them are crunchy: I deemed this the best tradeoff.

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I'm finding that one of the nice things about crispy chickpeas--especially if you make two cans--is that reheating them is less effort than making popcorn. I've started trying to time my chickpea-making so that I'll have leftovers available on work nights, when I'm often too tired to make popcorn.

(Why not make popcorn in advance, you ask? Because my popcorn pot is prone to creating damp spots in the popcorn. I've learned some tricks to reduce the risk (at the cost of making it more likely for the occasional kernel to fly out onto the stove or floor), and often have only two or one or even zero damp spots in my batches these days, but I still don't trust popcorn made with this pot to keep for very long.)