Pantry Staples

Chickpeas (Dry)

Beyond hummus and falafel, chickpeas anchor a wide range of dishes — simmered whole in a Spanish cocido stew, curried as chana masala in Indian cooking, and ground into chickpea flour (besan), the base for socca and farinata, two thin, savory flatbreads from the south of France and Italy respectively.

Sprouted chickpeas, soaked until they just begin to germinate, are a less common but genuine preparation used raw in salads for a crisp, slightly sweet bite — a different texture and use entirely from the soft, simmered chickpea most home cooks are familiar with.

For everyday cooking, canned chickpeas trade some texture and a bit of flavor depth for real convenience, while dry chickpeas cooked from scratch tend to hold their shape better in a dish like a chickpea salad where texture matters more than in a blended preparation like hummus.

Organic and conventional dry chickpeas cook essentially the same way, so the more useful quality signal at the store is simply freshness — older chickpeas that have sat in storage longer take noticeably longer to soften, regardless of any other label on the bag.

Chickpeas come in more than one type worldwide — the larger, rounder Kabuli chickpea familiar in the US and Mediterranean cooking, and the smaller, darker Desi chickpea more common in South Asian cooking, split and processed differently from the whole Kabuli form most American cooks reach for.

Chana masala, a spiced North Indian chickpea curry simmered in a tomato-and-onion base, is one of the most widely eaten chickpea dishes in the world by sheer population, a scale of everyday consumption that outpaces hummus's more recent popularity in Western cooking.

A pressure cooker cuts dry chickpeas' simmering time dramatically compared to a standard stovetop pot, which is part of why chickpeas are one of the more commonly pressure-cooked dried legumes in households that eat them often enough to justify keeping one on hand.

Chickpeas have been cultivated for thousands of years across the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean basin, among the older domesticated legumes still widely eaten today, with archaeological evidence placing their cultivation well before many other now-common beans reached the same regions.

A Spanish cocido, a slow-simmered one-pot meal built around chickpeas alongside meat and vegetables cooked together and often served in stages, shows a genuinely different role for the bean than the blended or fried preparations most American cooks default to.

Tossing warm, freshly cooked chickpeas with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt while they're still hot lets them absorb far more flavor than the same dressing added once they've cooled, a small timing trick worth using whenever chickpeas are headed for a salad rather than a soup or a puree.