My Kind of Chickpea Bread

For two breakfasts I have been serving this chickpea bread to my guests. For those interested, it’s grain-free. For everybody else, it is a rather amazing creation. I have not seen anything quite like that around.

I have been looking for the ways to bake without grains. I love baking, and no diet can get on the way of my feelings. Last week I learned another word for a healing routine such as diet - protocol. Some prefer to avoid the controversial emotions the word “diet” evokes, and they choose to call it protocol instead. If diet is something whimsical, a sign of caprice even, protocol definitely sounds more legitimate. So no protocol can get on the way of my love for baking.

Baking without grains is not so difficult these days with many bean and nut flour recipes available. And yet I could not find what I wanted.

Having worked so much with wheat flours, I knew there is no way to make a loaf like that without gluten, so I did not want my bread to pretend to be what it was not. I wanted a savory bread, soft and fluffy. I wanted a short list of ingredients each of which would be a whole food. And I wanted the bread to be real; the kind your grandma could bake if she were to do without grains.

Speaking of grandmas.. the Italian ones seems to have that figured out: Italian chickpea bread socca is the first thing that comes to your mind as long as the bean breads are concerned. I baked it a couple of times and yet found it too dense and somewhat heavy for a baked good that meant to accompany a meal rather than to claim to be a meal on its own.

That’s how my kind of chickpea bread was born. I decided to “water down” the chickpeas with a “vegetable flour”. Remember my homemade dry bouillon I make of the vegetables scraps? I collect all the vegetable trimmings, dry them in the oven first and then let them properly dry on the kitchen counter. Depending on what I shopped for, it can be collard green stems, broccoli leaves, tomato skins, carrot skins and any leftover herbs about to wilt.

This time instead of keeping the dry vegetable mix for a soup I ground it into a powder and imagined it to be a flour! It’s green, fiber-rich and bold tasting. I also lightened up the chickpea bread by adding a few eggs and good olive oil. The outcome? My kind of chickpea bread! It is moist. It tastes of herbs. It is super filling. It keeps the shape well. With a spread of choice it becomes a satisfying snack. I have fed it to a few dozens of people so far and have been asked for the recipe too often to keep it to myself. Here you go.

Chickpea Bread

I cooked chickpeas and pureed them as an alternative to the hard-to-find-in-Istanbul chickpea flour. We do have leblebi tozu (ground roasted chickpeas); I have not tried baking with it yet, so can’t report yet how it behaves. For the “vegetable flour” you can use a mix of any dehydrated vegetables (sebze kurusu, in Turkey) and grind them as fine as possible in a food processor. Ready vegetable mix such as sebze kurusu may already contain salt: taste and reduce the salt in the recipe accordingly.

Makes 1 loaf

Ingredients

320 g (2 cups) cooked chickpeas
190 g (3/4 cup) water (if have got, use the water you cooked the chickpeas in)
110 g (about 1 cup) finely ground dry vegetables (see the note above)
50 g (1/4 cup) olive oil
5 g ( 1 1/4 tsp) fine sea salt (see the note above)
4 g (1 tsp) baking soda
1/2 tbsp vinegar
3 large eggs

Directions

Preheat the oven to 180C/355F.

Transfer the cooked chickpeas and water in a food processor and puree until smooth. Add the rest of the ingredients, besides the eggs, and pulse to combine. In a separate bowl vigorously beat the eggs to foam for a minute or two. Fold the eggs in the chickpea bread dough. Transfer to a bread loaf tin lined with the parchment paper and bake for 50-60 min until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center of the chickpea bread comes out clean. Cool down and refrigerate if not eating immediately. Keep the bread in the fridge (eggs make it highly perishable otherwise) for up to 4-5 days.