How To: Chickpea Flour

I can't take credit for this recipe, which is why I'm calling it a "how to". My Saturday started with my husband heading to work and me wondering what I would do with myself while he was out of the house. I decided to start prepping myself for a return to vegan meals. I recently ordered some ingredients from Amazon, which included a 5-lb bag of chickpeas and unsweetened coconut flakes. Using a step-by-step guide from the internet, I wanted to make flour from the chickpeas. I also wanted to make a coconut flour using a recipe I found in a Kindle book I got for free from Amazon, which I will detail in another post.

First, the chickpea flour.

I won't restate how to do this because as I said, this isn't my recipe/method. If you want the step-by-step method for how to make the flour, go to the step-by-step guide I've linked above. What I do want to show you is how everything looked during the steps.

First, I started with the whole chickpeas. When I received the 5-lb bag from Amazon, I immediately transferred to a large storage container in hopes of keeping them fresh.

After grinding the chickpeas in my food processor and putting them in the wire-mesh strainer, I had a combination of partially whole chickpeas and what looked like chickpea meal.

I used a spoon to stir the chickpea mixture through the strainer to get as much of the meal through the mesh as possible. Then, it was time for me to use my new contraption.

One of my lovely coworkers gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday, which I turned into this spice grinder. So, I put the unprocessed chickpeas in the grinder and pulsed it to try to get it to a meal. I stirred it through the mesh strainer. I had to repeat the grinding process in the spice grinder to get it all processed. When I finished getting as much chickpea meal through the strainer that I could, I ended up with a small amount of unpowdered (if that a word) chickpeas, which I discarded.

Making this flour was a labor of love. It took me a good half hour to get these chickpeas processed into a flour. After I got all my flour done, I put it in a clean storage container. I ended up reusing a Chinese soup take-out container for storing the flour.

Finally, when it was all closed and ready for storing, I labelled the top of the container so I could identify the flour and when I made it.