Chickpea pasta is one combination that I’d hardly imagined. Do they match? Yes, they do! Although I’ve never seen it in any Italian restaurant, I found myself having cooked it several times and still want to cook more, yum!
In my cupboard, I often have a bag of dried chickpea standby for making chana masala, chickpea curry with coconut milk, or falafel.
A few days back, I soaked 300g dried chickpeas and made 3 portions of chana masala. For the leftover chickpeas, I wanted to make some tuna patties but, intimidated by too much work, eventually turned to a much simpler option — chickpea pasta, in Italian, pasta e ceci.
This recipe is learnt from a cookbook called ‘An A-Z of Pasta’, written by Rachel Roddy.
Cooking Notes
- Do not use canned chickpeas. The chickpea cooking broth is the base of this dish, meaning a tin of chickpea cannot be a substitution. My tips: The hurdle of making chickpea dishes is often forgetting to soak chickpeas. Once you’d decided to make any chickpea dish, set a soak-chickpea reminder on your phone. That’s what I do.
- Chana dal is a compromised alternative. Chana dal is a kind of chickpea (split chickpeas) popularly used in Indian food. It’s not that creamy and starchy, and its broth is less sweet too. However, chana dal takes a shorter time to cook — soaking for 4 hours and cooking for 20 minutes will do the job. If using chana dal, it’s better to add potatoes to thicken the soup. But overall, I’d recommend using the normal round chickpeas.
- Onion is not a must, but I purely obsessed with the sweetness from slow-cooked onion, and I believe it helps with overall flavour, unless anybody dislikes onion.
- Any short-grain pasta is fine. No lasagna sheets? No problem. Use any short-grain pasta you can find in the cupboard: macaroni, penne, conchiglie…Or, break the spaghetti into shorter pieces. Note that some short-grain pasta, such as orzo, has a tendency to absorb a lot of liquid.
Chickpea Pasta Recipe (Pasta e Ceci)
This unpretentious chickpea pasta may not looks appealing, but it’s very comforting to me. And, of course, delicious. It’s rather healthy, too!
Ingredients
Serves 2
- 110 g dried chickpeas (yields approx. 250 g chickpeas)
- 4 dried lasagna sheets
- 4 anchovy fillets (in oil)
- 1 small onion, sliced or diced
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 1 celery stalk, finely sliced
- 2 plum tomatoes from a tin
- a handful of parsley and basil, chopped
- salt and pepper
- extra virgin olive oil
How to Make
- Soak the chickpeas for 6-8 hours prior to cooking. In a pressure cooker, pour in 600 g water and 1 tsp salt. Bring it to a high pressure and cook for 10 minutes. Release pressure naturally. *If you want to cook more chickpeas in one shot, use 5 times water (of chickpeas) and 1% salt.
- Warm 2 tbsp of oil in a large frying pan, add the onions, celery, garlic and anchovies with a pinch of salt. Cook until the onions are softened and the anchovies dissolved.
- Tip in the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes. Break it down with a spatula if the tomatoes are in big pieces. Stir in the chickpeas with 700ml cooking broth and bring to a simmer.
- Crack the lasagne sheets into smaller pieces and throw into the pan. Take care not to let them overlap and stick together. Let it cook for a further 10 minutes, until the pasta sheets are cooked through.
- We are looking for a slightly thick soup consistency here, so add in more broth if required. Have a taste and adjust. If you’re looking for a brighter flavour then try to add some lemon juice.
- After plating, add the herbs for freshness, drizzle in extra virgin olive oil and a few twist of freshly cracked black pepper.
