All About Chickpeas

If you don’t already consider chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans) a pantry staple, you should. They’re incredibly versatile—as at home in Italian pasta dishes and vegetable soups as they are in Indian curries and Middle Eastern hummus. Keep a stock of dried as well as canned chickpeas on hand, and you'll be ready to make the recipes in this course at a moment's notice.

FYI - all canned chickpeas aren't created equal. In our testing, we found a difference in texture as well as in flavor from brand to brand. Here's an interesting fact: The differences in texture aren’t due to the type of chickpea. According to Douglas Cook, a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, the majority of canned chickpeas are a seed type called kabuli. He explained that Westerners generally prefer kabuli to the other common seed type, desi, which is grown in India and Ethiopia. Kabuli chickpeas are less bitter and have thinner skins, which helps them absorb moisture during cooking and canning. As a rule, kabuli chickpeas are larger and lighter in color than desi, but they can also be bred to different sizes and other manufacturer specifications, which may explain some of the differences we observed.

So what makes these chickpeas so different from brand to brand? Keep reading!

To understand other variables, we spoke with Mark Kirsten, a third-generation chickpea grower and distributor in California. He explained that virtually all canned chickpeas are first dried at the farms and then shipped to canneries, where they’re soaked, blanched, and pressure-cooked in the cans. Manufacturers often add salt and color-preserving additives or firming agents. Experts told us that these soaking and cooking steps probably created the differences we saw in our chickpeas.

• Firmer chickpeas were likely cooked for less time and/or at lower temperatures. The best chickpeas, which were firm yet creamy, were processed just right or had a small amount of calcium chloride, a firming agent that’s commonly added to canned beans.

• Softer chickpeas were probably processed longer and/or at hotter temperatures. (The softest also had the thickest, most opaque bean liquid—a sign that more starch and protein had been extracted, which experts told us indicates overcooking.)

Which chickpeas were just right, according to our Test Kitchen Tasters? Tasters agreed that the optimal texture was firm yet creamy. Our winning canned beans were earthy, slightly nutty, and firm with just enough give; click here to see everything we tested.