Can't get enough chickpeas?
Whenever I find myself so fixated on a particular ingredient, recipe after recipe, that it starts to get tiresome (or I start to get embarrassed about it), I try to break free in one of two ways.
I'll widen my focus to include similar things in the same general category. (Enough with all these kale recipes! What about Swiss chard?) Or I'll go in the other direction, looking even more closely at the object of my fixation to find other forms of it to explore.
I've been doing the latter lately with chickpeas. I've made no secret of the fact that if I had just one type of legume to cook the rest of my life, I'd pick those. But I have another mouth to feed at home (not to mention readers to satisfy), so I can't just keep cranking out garbanzo-bean treatments week in and week out. And I already devote plenty of attention to all other kinds of pulses.
The solution: chickpea flour, a way to get my fix while keeping a little variety in the dinner rotation.
My first step in this direction was the classic flatbread called socca in France and farinata in Italy, in various iterations. Soon enough, I saw it celebrated in two cookbooks: "The Chickpea Flour Cookbook" by Camilla V. Saulsbury (Lake Isle Press, 2015) and the more recent "Chickpea Flour Does It All" by Lindsey S. Love (The Experiment, 2016). Both show a wide variety of uses for what is also called garbanzo bean flour, besan and gram flour: in cookies, cakes, brownies; to thicken soups and sauces; as a shortcut to creamy hummus; to make noodles; and more.
Love's recipe for a simple quiche with a crust that includes almond and chickpea flours (making it gluten-free) drew me in first. It uses olive oil rather than butter, and you press it into a cast-iron skillet, which adds crispness to the nutty-tasting crust - and an air of rusticity to the simple, eggy dish. Nobody eating it would think of chickpeas unless you mentioned them.
The explorations are just beginning. I've been on something of a tostada run lately, too, so when I spotted one of Love's recipes that instructs you in making the crispy fried tortillas with chickpea flour, water, coconut milk and olive oil, I bookmarked it. Part of me is skeptical that it could ever beat a corn tortilla, but the other part of me really wants to believe the title of Love's book. I'll know the truth soon enough.