Making chickpea flour at home (also called besan or gram flour)

I have decided I'm making chickpea flour.  Don't really know what I'm doing, but I have chickpeas and I have lots of things that grind.

I won't be using the stone flour mill because the oils in beans can gum up the stones.  But I do have a metal grinder that is often used for corn and can grind both wet and dry.  I'm going to start there first.

In The power of pulses, Dan says

Grinding Gluten-Free Flour from Pulses

You can grind your own flour from pulses useing a blender or flour mill...

Each pulse offers a slightly different texture and flavour of flour.  choose from chickpeas, lentils or small beans.  You can also experiment with roasting your pulses first - no more than 20 minuites at 350F - to ease the grinding and give your flour a nuttier flavour.  Or roast the flour itself in the oven in an uncovered cast iron frying pan for a simular amount of time ot enrich its flavour, stirring with a fork every 3 to 4 minutes so that it browns evenly.

After grinding, store your pulse flour in an airtight container in a coll and dry place, or freeze to keep it super-fresh.

...

Chickpea flour (also called besan or gram flour) is by far the most popular...

The thing that I'm most concerned with is that raw beans are difficult to digest.  Joseph mentions in the dry bean and pea thread

Another bean cooking fail that I see from time to time, is that someone grinds up dry beans to make flour, then they use the flour to make bread... That really accentuates the taste of the bean poison to me. Breads just don't get hot enough to deactivate the poison. So whenever anyone tells me that they are going to add beans to a bread, I recommend that they cook the beans first, and then mash them before adding to the bread.  

That's one way to go... and I like it for sweet breads.  However, I wonder... there are cultures that traditionally use bean and chickpea flours.  What do they do to get rid of that poison taste?  


Once I do make chickpea flour, what recipes can I use it in?  
This is all inspired by a trip to the grocery shop where I was seeking gluten-free bread, only to discover that they have even more artificial ingredients in them than regular 'bread'.  A great big thread on that later, but for now, let's chat about chickpea flour, chickpea flour recipes, and that sort of thing.

First recipe I think I'll try is something called 'Socca' from the Power of Pulses book.  Once I figure out how to make this flour.

R Ranson wrote:However, I wonder... there are cultures that traditionally use bean and chickpea flours.  What do they do to get rid of that poison taste?

Falafel is one of the most famous foods made from chickpea flour. It is deep fried.

Many traditional recipes I found for using chickpea flour say something like: mix chickpea flour and oil, and sauté until toasted.

A recipe for flat bread recommended pouring the batter into a smoking hot skillet, and then baking in an oven at 500 F for a long time, until crunchy.

The thing that all of these recipes have in common is high temperatures. High temperatures deactivate the poison in chickpeas.

I found a few recipes that treated chickpea flour as a substitute for wheat. I consider those recipes to be highly suspect. Also they weren't claiming to be "traditional" recipes.

R Ranson wrote:Once I do make chickpea flour, what recipes can I use it in?  

I like adding a little bit of bean flour to stews as a thickening agent. As long as it's boiled long enough to get rid of the poison taste.

R Ranson, I thought of this company when reading your earlier post about loving pasta and wondering about gluten/wheat-free alternatives:  http://www.eatbanza.com/pages/our-pasta


If you already own a pasta maker, you may be able to use your chickpea flour in a pasta recipe.  Additionally wanted to mention in that previous thread that we've tried black bean pasta and others from the following producer that you may wish to try:  http://www.explorecuisine.com/en/products/bean-pastas.html

Because the poison/toxin thing isn't just chickpeas, it applies to almost all pulses (dry beans and peas).  I've moved that tangent to its own thread so that it can get the attention it deserves.  There is also a lot of information about it in the cooking with dry beans and peas thread.  

A general summary of toxins/poison in raw pulses:  Many raw pulses contain a variety of toxins that can cause digestive upset.  Different people respond differently to these different toxins, often related to genetics.  So for example, people of Mediterranean decent often have trouble digesting fava beans.  People of European descent often find it easier to eat chickpeas, favas, lentils and old world pulses than new world dry beans.  There are other chemicals in raw pulses that reduce the bodies ability to absorb and process certain nutrients.  Most of these toxins/poisons are neutralised when the bean is cooked sufficiently and at a high enough temperature (usually rolling boil for 10 minutes or more).  Some are not.

Some of the difficult to digest starches are altered into easy to digest sugars when the bean is sprouted.  

That's hugely oversimplifying things.  For more on this topic, check out the above links.  

For this thread, let's focus specifically on chickpeas and making them easier to digest when transformed into flour.

I came across this book called chickpea flour does it all.   Sounds promising.  Lucky for me, my local library has a copy I can borrow.  Sad thing is that I'm not the only one waiting to borrow this.  It's going to be a few weeks/months before it's my turn.



From amazon:

Meet the New Must-Have-It Pantry Staple: Chickpea Flour

Why make chickpea flour your new go-to? Because everyone—gluten-free or not—will find a reason to love it. This versatile alternative to wheat flour shines in savory and sweet dishes alike. It’s been used for centuries around the world, and is famous in Nice, France, where the flatbread socca is enjoyed with a chilled glass of rosé.

In this gorgeously photographed cookbook, Lindsey S. Love takes inspiration from her favorite seasonal ingredients, global flavors, and much-loved family recipes to create vibrant gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegetarian dishes where chickpea flour is the star. Gluten-free diners especially will be amazed by the variety—nothing’s off the table anymore, and taste is never sacrificed. Plus, many recipes are vegan—taking advantage of chickpea flour as a base for vegan sauces and a soy-free alternative to tofu.

Lindsey’s inventive recipes meld sophisticated and subtle flavors—and beg to be shared with friends and family at any time of the year!

Toast It, Sift It, Simmer It . . . Chickpea Flour Does It All:
Thickens and flavours hearty dishes like Sunchoke and Leek Soup
Gives any dish a protein boost, even Vanilla Bean Lavender Cupcakes
Adds creamy texture to dairy-free dishes, such as Loaded Sweet Potatoes with Chickpea Sour Cream
And brings back family favorites—now gluten-free—like pizza (Chickpea Pizza with Asparagus and Pea Shoot Tangle) and pancakes (Sautéed Pear and Sage Pancakes with Almonds)!

Since chickpeas are so easy to grow here, I think this book is going to be great.  

But, like I said, it's weeks away.  In the meantime, let's keep brainstorming yummy things.



I really like the pasta idea mentioned above.  I do have a pasta maker.  I wonder if boiling pasta would be enough to get rid of the toxins/poison taste?

First try at making chickpea flour:  I toasted a couple of cups of chickpeas at 350F for 25min, then ground them in my mill.  It took two goes and the flour is still a bit gritty.  But the smell was delightful.  Like toasted almonds, only better.





Now to decide what I want to make first.  socca, pakora, or onion rings.

First socca turned out pretty poor.  The four was just too course.  The bread didn't hold together and wouldn't cook in the middle.  Taste was good though.

For my next try, I'm letting the batter sit overnight so that maybe the chickpea flour might absorb some water, then cook it for breakfast.

I would be interested in making flour out of dry chickpeas and other pulses.  I do not yet have any equipment to make flour.

I would then like to add this flour to other flours to make crepes.  When I make crepes normally, they are still a bit moist inside but crusty on the outside.  Do I have to cook them like a hard taco shell to get rid of the "poisons"?

Besan, aka gram flour, is a fairly common ingredient in India, though not in my particular region. The main things I know of that are made with besan are

1) Pakoras, similar to tempura, are basically vegetables or anything else covered in batter and then deep fried. Pakora batter is often made of besan. This follows Joseph's suggestion that it needs to be cooked at high temperature. I don't suppose that will replace bread in your life.

2) Kadhi, perhaps the original word from which the British got the word "curry," the few times I've had it, was made of besan flour mixed with a yogurt to make a gravy, with pakoras floating in it. It is eaten over rice, or with chapattis. There might be many variations around India.
http://foodviva.com/daal-kadhi-recipes/punjabi-kadhi-recipe/
http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/punjabi-kadhi-recipe-punjabi-kadhi-pakora/
You might hardly understand the Indian English those are written in, though.

But now googling for you, I see that there are recipes online for "besan roti" (flat breads), so it can be done. Sorry if you don't know the vocab, though: tava (iron chapatti pan), kadai (wok), curd (plain yogurt), mixie (blender), etc!

We can't grow chickpeas here but regular peas are an easy crop.  Yellow field peas or the pole variety Amplissimo Victoria do great here and work as chickpea substitutes in the kitchen.  The Amplissimo works great for hummus and falafel.  We've ground yellow field peas into flour and after soaking as a runny batter fried them up into flat breads.  I've not thought of roasting the peas before grinding but may try that next time. We haven't tried making pasta with peas yet.

Are these peas you raised yourself? Could you grind them when first shelled so they are not so hard?
I make the seed flour form y daily bread, which I cook in a double boiler, in a coffee mill and only lentils really break down easy enough to not eventually break the mill. I leve my seed mixture cooking in the double boiler for at least an hour to neutralize the anti nutrients.  Preferably I leave it on the stove at the lowest setting for 4 hours and have it for lunch. By that time it is very bread like.

We raise both yellow field peas and Amplissimo Vicktoria dry peas.  They are grown for harvesting as you would dry beans and shelled when thoroughly dry.  I think the pre-roasting before milling would help with grinding as they have a tendency to gum up the steel plates of our flour mill.  I'm hoping that after roasting they will be more "brittle".  We have milled commercial yellow split peas and they worked the same as our home grown peas.

I found some chickpea flour in the shop yesterday, Bob's flour or something like that.  It is MUCH finer than the stuff I was able to make with my hand crank mill.  I'm looking forward to trying it out.  Pakora for dinner tonight, from the recipe that Rebecca linked to above.


But this leaves me with a bit of a challenge.  I have loads of chickpeas that need using up - in my enthusiasm for learning how to cook dry pulses I bought a 50-kilo bag of chickpeas last year and there's over half still left.  I was really hoping to make flour with this.  What can I do differently to make a nice, fine flour from chickpeas?

What if you were to soak them for a few hours before grinding them? You wouldn't get a dry flour-it would be more like a masa harina- so  you couldn''t grind lots and then store it, but I'd think you could get a good smooth dough that way, which could then be used for whatever. When you think about it, the first thing one generally does, cooking with flour is to add a liquid to it...

Wet soaking the peas, discarding the soak water and blending with fresh water is how soymilk is made.  The soymilk is blended with hot water then cooked and strained.  If less water were used, or no water for the milling, this may work for making peas/chickpeas into a flat bread.  It would be worth experimenting to see what kind of texture you would end up with.

What if you roasted cooked (you know, soaked, then rinsed, then fully cooked) chick peas until dry and crunchy, season and eat some as a delightful snack, and try grinding some of those into flour? Of course far more labor intensive, but if you're cooking up a batch for something else any way, perhaps not so onerous.

From 20+ years of gluten-free baking, chickpea flour, while surprisingly common in GF baked goods, has always been one of my least favorite flours. Though I love the chick pea and other bean flours in the various Indian dishes. I hadn't realized it was the poison taste, and the different in high heat versus lower baking heat things, though that makes such "d'oh!!" sense now!

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:What if you roasted cooked (you know, soaked, then rinsed, then fully cooked) chick peas until dry and crunchy, season and eat some as a delightful snack, and try grinding some of those into flour? Of course far more labor intensive, but if you're cooking up a batch for something else any way, perhaps not so onerous.

From 20+ years of gluten-free baking, chickpea flour, while surprisingly common in GF baked goods, has always been one of my least favorite flours. Though I love the chick pea and other bean flours in the various Indian dishes. I hadn't realized it was the poison taste, and the different in high heat versus lower baking heat things, though that makes such "d'oh!!" sense now!

I've done exactly what you've described with other beans to make instant beans (ground into a meal) for convenience or camping food. It would definitely be edible but the experimental piece might be whether the starches would respond in the same way as when used raw. Now I'm going to have to do it both ways to see how it works - something to explore in the new year!

Besan, aka gram flour, is a fairly common ingredient in India, though not in my particular region. The main things I know of that are made with besan are

Crisp golden potato and onion bites cooked with a selection of spices in a gram flour batter which are deep fried. ... I cook pakora in a number of different ways, either with onion and potato or a mixture of vegetables; onion, potato, aubergines and cauliflower.

The besan laddu prepared with this recipe gets its unique and mouth watering flavor, taste and aroma from ghee, roasted gram flour and generous use of saffron and cardamom.

https://www.rachnas-kitchen.com/onion-bajiya-recipe/
https://www.rachnas-kitchen.com/besan-ladoo-recipe/

R,

Hope you are still following this. I went through a phase when I was looking for bread substitutes, and working with a bunch of people from India. I love Besan flour, and I still make things with it.

What works- like people have said, thin stuff that can get exposed to heat. I made crepes with it, basically same as the traditional recipe, 2 cups flour, 2 cups milk (I substitute kefir, can use other stuff), 2 eggs (I go maybe a little egg heavy), some sweetening stuff (preference molasses for me). Whisk and let stand a couple times, then thin if needed so the batter can be circled out to the sides and it gets real crispy. Unlike crepes, they must be cooked on both sides or they do taste off. I recommend a small (like <8") pan, and I use either non-virgin olive oil or coconut.

For massive amounts of chickpeas, dried in a bag, make hummus! I have made it with kefir, which gives it that nice citrus/lactic acid flavor without lemon juice. Also made it with sorrel, which was fantastic, very lemony. There are lots of tahini-free hummus recipes out there on the interwebs.

I am researching grinders for this, so appreciate your input. We don't have chickpeas but looking to do the same with winterpeas (which are drying in the pod now), and maybe other pulses in the future. As always I consider Joseph's input the final word. He knows his pulses!

I see that this thread has been revived. I wanted to report that we did try pan roasting whole yellow peas, then ground them into flour. Very easy to do. However, when we tried to make a flat bread with the flour as we have done in the past with raw flour (1.5 parts water to 1 part pea flour), it didn't work at all. They crumbled into small bits. Tasted good but the starch didn't behave predictably as usual. Maybe adding boiling hot water and allowing it to soak longer than an hour would make a difference?

Larisa,

in my experience you need a binder. Could be egg, arrowroot powder, etc. Otherwise yes you get a brittle mess.

I would concur on the need for a binder with the roasted pea flour. But the raw pea flour makes fine crepes or wraps with just water and a long soak time. Some change occurs to the starch in the roasting process that makes for a crumbly result. I think I should try the technique that I use for buckwheat wraps. I use 1.75 cups of water, bring it to a boil and sprinkle 1 cup of buckwheat flour on the surface of the boiling water, cover the pan, and let it boil for 2 minutes. Then I stir the flour into the water and let it sit until it's cool enough to knead by hand. The dough rests for a bit after kneading, then gets divided, pressed into tortilla rounds, and dry-fried on a cast iron griddle. As long as the process is followed exactly, the wraps come out flexible without the need for any other ingredients. More experimentation is in order.

I'm wondering how cooked chickpeas that were then dehydrated into thin layers would perform in a grinder or molcajete. Dehydrator experiment waiting to happen.

Mike Barkley wrote:I'm wondering how cooked chickpeas that were then dehydrated into thin layers would perform in a grinder or molcajete. Dehydrator experiment waiting to happen.

It works excellently. And tastes a LOT better than raw beans. And can be spiced as it's cooked if you want. And any beans. I had some white beans that got old and hard, (someone else had stored them badly) I pressure cooked them several times until I could blender them up and pour them on dehydrator trays. Makes excellent flour. Good use of bad beans. I tend to throw any excess beans on to cook, then through a solar dehydrator, add them to my mixed bean flour bin.

I also though, have a bin that I throw vegetable flour in, same idea, overgrown zucchinis, etc, cook them, dry them, grind them, add them to the bin. Makes an excellent addition to breads!

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit among the "Pennsylvania Germans", by Edith M. Thomas includes these recipes:

NUT BREAD

3 cups graham flour.
1 cup wheat flour.
4 teaspoons baking powder.
1 cup chopped English walnuts.
1 cup sugar.
1 small teaspoon "Mapleine" flavoring (if liked).
½ cup milk.
Pinch salt.
½ cup floured raisins (seeded).
Put in a good-sized bread pan and bake on hour in a moderate oven. Strange as it may seem, this bread is lighter and better if allowed to stand a half hour before being placed in the oven to bake.



"MARY'S" RECIPE FOR WHEAT BREAD (use for Graham bread below)

1 cup sweet milk (scalded).
1 cup cold water.
1 cake Fleischman's yeast (dissolved in a small quantity of luke-warm water).
1½ teaspoonfuls sugar.
1 rounded teaspoonful salt.
1 tablespoonful butter.
Flour, about 1½ quarts.
This makes good bread and, as bread is apt to chill if set over night in a cold kitchen, or sour if allowed to stand over night in summer, set this sponge early in the morning. Stiffen with flour and knead about 25 minutes; place the dough in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise about two hours and when well-risen and light, knead and stand one hour. Then mold into shapely loaves, place in pans, brush tops of loaves with melted butter, and when doubled in bulk, in about 45 minutes put in an oven which is so hot you can hold your hand in only while you count thirty, or if a little flour browns in the oven in about six minutes, it is hot enough for bread. The oven should be hot enough to brown the bread slightly five minutes after being put in. Medium-sized loaves of bread require from ¾ of an hour to one hour to bake. When bread is sufficiently baked it can be told by turning the loaf over and rapping with the knuckles on the bottom of the loaf. If it sounds hollow, it is thoroughly baked, and should be taken from the oven. Stand loaves up on end against some object, where the air can circulate around them, and brush a little butter over the top to soften the crust. An authority on the chemistry of foods cautious housewives against cooling loaves of bread too rapidly after taking from the oven, and I should like to add a word of caution against eating fresh breads of any kind. Bread should be baked at least twelve hours before being eaten. The sponge for this bread was set at 6 o'clock in the morning; bread was baked at 10.30.

From 1 pint of liquid, 1 cake of yeast and about 1½ quarts of flour were made two loaves of bread. More yeast is required to raise a sponge containing sugar, eggs and shortening than is required to raise bread sponge containing only liquid, flour and yeast.

"FRAU SCHMIDTS" EASILY-MADE GRAHAM BREAD

Should you care to have a couple of loaves of graham bread instead of all-wheat, take a generous cup of the above sponge before it is stiffened beyond a thick batter, and add one tablespoonful of brown sugar or molasses, stiffen with graham flour (not quite as stiff as when making wheat bread), rub butter or lard on top of dough, cover and set in a warm place to rise. When light, mold into one small loaf (never make graham bread into large loaves), place in oblong pan, cover, let stand until light, about 1½ hours, when it should have doubled in size; put in oven and bake thoroughly. When the loaf is taken from the oven, brush butter over the top. This keeps the crust moist.

If a wholesome loaf of "Corn Bread" is wished, use fine, yellow, granulated cornmeal to stiffen the sponge instead of graham flour; do not make dough too stiff.

Glad to see that recipe! Been years since I have made graham crackers! I used to do it a lot.

For what it's worth, Graham Flour is a coarsely stone ground whole wheat flour, while Gram Flour is ground chickpeas. Gram is the word from India for chickpeas. Sylvester Graham was a health food advocate in the 1830s who wanted people to eat less processed flour, with more nutrients.  


So for the crackers, if gram flour is used with that recipe they won't adhere together. But tweaking it so it COULD would be neat! Would increase the protein of the crackers. Sylvester Graham would be all for that!

I would definitely recommend dehydrating before grinding. After soaking for several hours, place them in the machine at 135 degrees F.

It'll take a little bit longer. However, this is better than roasting them, because you want to retain as much of the nutrients as possible when grinding them in to a flour later. Roasting is more for flavoring whole chickpeas!