Three New Crops: Part Two

We eat our fair share of hummus in our household. Since it’s so easy to make, we buy cases of chickpeas and whip up our own whenever we get a craving. So, it only seemed right to try growing our own chickpeas, a.k.a. garbanzos, a.k.a. lots of other names. I started shopping around online for varieties that would grow in our zone and settled on Golden Garbanzo from one of the larger heirloom seed companies. The seeds didn’t look like the chickpeas I’m used to but I went ahead and planted them anyway.

They grew great! The plants were small with beautiful, finely divided leaves. Their flowers were rather pretty, too. They reminded me of the flowers of the lentils I once tried to grow, only larger and less blue. Those flowers were tiny! They also seemed to be free of pests, unless you count what must have been a rabbit who bedded down in them one night knocking a few of the plants askew.

Unlike last episode’s rice they all ripened at pretty much the same time. I only picked a few early dry ones and then, when they were just about ready, we were going out of town and rain was threatening. We went to the garden, cut off every plant and stuffed them in a bag to bring home. I spread them out in the basement to finish drying. When we returned they were nice and dry and I was able to thresh them the same way I do my other beans.

The first thing I noticed about them was that they were hard, like rock hard, and very rough. As a test I cooked a few. After over an hour of simmering they were still pretty chewy. I started looking around for more information on garbanzos and found out there are different kinds. These turned out to not be the big, round chickpeas you make hummus, falafel, etc. with. What I think they are is a kind of flour chickpea that’s meant to be ground and features in many Indian dishes where it’s known as gram flour or besan. Great. Well, at least I love Indian food.

Again, I spent time messing around with different ways of pounding up these little pebbles. My cast iron mortar and pestle worked OK.

Like the rice, I could only process small quantities at a time. They had a tendency to pop out of the mortar, but once the skin was cracked they broke up pretty easily. Then I just sifted them through a fine mesh strainer to get any stray remains of the skin out. It was pretty tedious so I dinked around at it off and on (mostly off) for months.

Then I had a brainstorm. In the cupboard is a coffee grinder we reserve for spice grinding. I figured it was worth a shot and tried a small batch. Success! In less than fifteen minutes I was done and had a small jar of soft, protein-rich, home-grown garbanzo flour.

Now I just need to decide what to make with it. It’s got to be something kind of special considering the work I put into making it. There are scores of good recipes online for Indian food and I’m open to suggestions.