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Cooking chickpeas is boring and cooked chickpeas are boring but it's useful to have some around to have falafel for lunch.
- A mug full of dry chickpeas (of course but it could be less of them)
- Bread crumbs or oat flour
- Garlic cloves
- Fresh parsley
- Salt
- Pepper
- Cumin (to taste)
- The juice of half of a lemon (or a whole lemon if you so wish)
- 1/4 of a cup of water.
- Frying oil
Chickpeas need to be soaked in water during the night before. They are not gonna be cooked separately.
Turn on the stove with a frying pan with oil. Enough oil to cover a small ball of dough.
Toss the soaked chickpeas into a blender with the other ingredients except for the oil of course until you get a paste and you might add more oat flour to it or more bread crumbs. Bread crumbs in my opinion make falafel more crunchy but the oat flavor is also good. I don't recommend using wheat flour. You just need enough oat flour or bread crumbs to make it dry enough not to fall apart. You should make small balls with your dough ready to toss into the pan with already boiling oil.
Just make sure you have enough balls of falafel to toss at the same time (take care with the hot oil!). This is important not only because you could get burned yourself but because the balls can get burned themselves and also because they actually get cooked during the process.
I always have two issues:
- Getting the falafel in the oil for too long which ends up with a nugget that's not necessarily burnt but still too hard to bite. You would want a soft falafel
- Falling short with the salt (this is really frustrating if you don't get it right)
Also be careful at the beginning when adding some water to the mix before you get the dough from the blender. It's important that your dough is soft but not watery and make sure your parsley is washed correctly and cut in such a way that you don't feel like you're eating the stem when you have your falafels ready.
This is not much of a recipe because it's intentionally not written with precise proportions as I didn't have them but if I figure out something else to add I'll come back. Also if you have an advice for me you can write me an email with the subject "recipe falafel" and I'll know what you mean.