Chickpea Flour

One of the toughest things about living in a small, rural town, is grocery shopping.  Within my town, there are 3 grocery stores, all of which carry a wide variety of chips, sodas, meats, breads, and occasionally some unusual produce (read: fresh Brussels sprouts and parsnips).  However, when trying to cook a meal that calls for an unusual ingredient or spice, I am typically out of luck.   So when trying to cook anything that is gluten free, vegetarian or vegan, well, you can guess how difficult it can be. I live an hour from the closest Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.  When I am near those stores, I will stop in and pick up some things I like, but I lack the storage space to purchase a whole bunch of things I *might* someday use in a recipe.  This has forced me to, well, improvise.

Lately, I have been eyeing up some great recipes that call for chickpea flour, also known as garbanzo or gram flour.  This is a common ingredient in Moroccan and Indian food, which I happen to love.  But it can also be used in the place of other types of flours in other recipes.  Today, during my shopping, I searched for it, and came up empty handed.  Well you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention?  Totally true.

I decided to grind my own chickpea flour.

I got a bag of dehydrated garbanzo beans.  I pulled out my mini food processor, and got to work.

I poured about a third of the bag of beans into the food processor, and set it to "grind".  After a couple of minutes, I opened the processor, dumped the contents into a mesh sifter, and sifted out the portion of flour from the larger chunks of chickpeas.  Then those large chunks were returned to the processor.

This pattern of "grind, sift, return, repeat" went on for about an hour, with me slowly adding more chickpeas in, until the entire bag was ground.  It resulted in 3.5 cups of flour.  Not too shabby.  It certainly was not a difficult process, just a little messy.  There was a thin layer of flour on my counter top when I was finished, but it was easily cleaned up.

All in all, this was a pretty worthwhile project.  Sure I could have just ordered some from the internet, or made a trip to a store further away that carried it, but I am proud of myself for using my resources and items available locally to get what I needed, saving money in the process.