It’s pretty amazing how far a small bag of dried chickpeas can go. I picked up about a cup and a quarter last week in town and decided to sprout them for a few days. After about six days, they’d expanded to four cups of nicely sprouted chickpeas:

I used half for Tamari-Roasted Chickpeas (yum), and boiled up the other half for hummus. 

My niece, Annie, mentioned the other day that the smoothest hummus possible comes from peeled chickpeas. I’d heard that bit of information before but wondered who would possibly have the time for such a ridiculously tedious endeavour.

I was listening to a great Andrew Bird playlist on Deezer, however, and thought, What the hell, I may as well give it a try. I think it took me the entire Things are Really Great Here, Sort Of…. album to peel those suckers, but I did it. The result is indeed smooth, BUT I’m not sure whether it’s smooth enough to warrant standing at the kitchen counter peeling tiny little beans for more than half an hour even with Andrew Bird playing the soundtrack of your life. 

The peels:

For the Tamari-Roasted Chickpeas, I used this recipe. The result was much crunchier this time–really delicious. I think the issue may be the extraordinarily hot oven up here at the cabin.

The result of both: