Cooking and Freezing Chickpeas

I’ve really enjoyed doing this!

Forever I have bought my beans in a can. I tend to buy organic and they are not cheap, but for convenience they are great. However, I’ve become increasingly worried about BPA (Bisphenol-A) in the lining of cans and it’s really, really hard here in the UK to find cans that don’t use BPA.

So… off to the dried aisle I went. I decided to start with chickpeas.

I popped them in a bowl last night before going to bed, as they have to soak for 12 hours.

This morning I came down and they looked like this:

All puffed up and lovely looking!!

Next I rinsed them in batches, and picked out a few dodgy looking ones.

I put them in a BIG pan, filled it with cold water and brought it straight up to the boil. There was a lot of foam on the surface, so I spooned it off a few times.

I left it at a rolling boil for 10 minutes and then turned the heat down and let them simmer for 40 minutes (50 minutes in total).

Then I wanted to turn my dried chickpeas into “convenience” chickpeas.

I let them cool down completely by spreading them out on clean dinner plates.

And then I measured out 160g (2 x 80g portions) into freezer bags and popped them in the freezer.

A quick (non-organic) cost comparison, obviously excluding the cost of the gas to cook the peas:

Cans cost around 65p for 240g drained chickpeas.

I paid £1.10 for 500g of dried chickpeas.

A 400g UK can gives you 240g of drained chickpeas, so 3 portions at 80g each. That’s 22p a portion.

My dried packet, after cooking and filtering out a few dodgy peas yielded 12 portions. That’s 9p a portion!

So that’s a huge saving AND the bonus of ready to go chickpeas in the freezer, in nice little portions so I can just chuck them straight into dinner, whizz up some hummus or pop them in a salad.