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| Panelle |
We think it happened like this: we were shopping and wanted to buy various milled items. I wanted to try a recipe that called for chickpea flour. We needed some semolina. Instead of one bag of each, we ended up with two bags of chickpea flour and no semolina. Oops. Chickpea flour went from "it'd be nice to try this recipe" to "use up this damn chickpea flour."
A year ago, Mark Bittman had written about some dishes made with chickpeas, including a Sicilian chickpea fritter, panelle. He recommended them as an appetizer, and so I tried them.
The first step was easy. Boil two cups of water. I was pretty certain I could manage that one. You then cook the chickpea flour, add salt and pepper, simmer, and add olive oil. Once it's cooked, you spread the stuff out in a sheet pan and let it chill.
Here's where I made my (minor) mistake. Bittman says to cut them up (easy, you can do it with a spatula) and fry them in about a quarter inch of olive oil. Yes, but maybe let them warm up a bit first. I tried this right out of the refrigerator and had a dreadful time because they were just to cold to brown and crisp.
Once I realized my mistake, I sent the earlier batches back into the oil for further cooking. They got brown. I sprinkled them with some salt (I forgot Bittman's recommended pepper). By the time we ate them, they were cool. And still yummy.
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There are a whole raft of Indian dishes (well, maybe not a whole raft, but definitely some) that are made with chickpea/garbanzo-bean flour, which they know as besan. We have some frozen vegetable pakoras from Trader Joe’s sitting in our freezer right now, and the coating on them is chickpea flour. There are even Indian candies made with besan, I kid you not (and they’re pretty tasty, too).
ReplyDeleteSide note: I wonder if the chickpea/garbanzo bean reference is geographical? Growing up in Southern California, I never heard my family call them chickpeas, only “garbanzo beans.“ I should look that up; there’s got to be some obscure American Dialect Society map of that somewhere, wouldn’t you think?