The chickpea (
Cicer arietinum), also called garbanzo bean, is popular because it's easy to grow, delicious to cook, helps the soil, and is an extremely nutritious
staple crop.
This
thread is for celebrating chickpeas and glorious garbanzo beans. It's about growing, breeding, cooking, and anything else chickpea that pops up.
Growing:
Plant them in the spring at the same time as garden peas. Some
chickpeas will overwinter in mild climates like the Pacific north-west and north Africa, which makes for a much higher yield. Coming from a Mediterranean clime, Chickpeas are on of the few pulses that grow well where I am. They adore wet winters and dry summers.
They are also excelent nitrogen fixers.
Chickpeas come in many different colours from beige, to brown, to red, to black, to almost white.
Black Kabuli chickpeas
Plant 18" apart in rows 1 foot apart. Mulch when the weather starts to warm to keep the soil moist and the weeds down.
Cooking:
This old world pulse is one of the few pulses with mostly soluble fibre. Basically, what this means is that people on a low fibre diet (like those with Crohn's disease) can enjoy chickpeas.
Chickpeas can be
cooked like other pulses, eaten young and fresh from the plant, ground into
flour, mashed into hummus and some can even be popped like popcorn.
Carol Deppe talks about popbeans in her book The Resilient Gardener. Chickpeas also make
fantastic miso paste. It's easy to make chickpea miso at home - possibly the easiest miso to make.
The leaves of the chickpea plant can be 'milked' for an acid which is supposed to make an amazing condiment. I haven't tried this yet, but apparently, one goes out to the chickpeas in the early morning and uses a cloth to wipe off the dew. The cloth is then wrung out and the liquid collected.
Seed:
One can harvest chickpea seed from their grocery shop. It's good to do a germination test on them first, but I find they usually have 90% or higher.
For specialty, organic chickpea seed, here's a list of a few places that I've seen them for sale.
Salt Spring Island Seeds
golden garbanzos at baker creak seeds
Carol Deppe seeds
A pretty small list, eh? That's because not many places
sell them yet. But It's catching on.
With so much variety and so much goodness, no wonder chickpeas are the main staple crop of so many cultures.
Let's chat about chickpeas. Growing them, enjoying them, any questions, troubles, triumphs or curiosities.