Chickpea flour has always *sounded* like a good idea. I've been meaning to try it out. I'd read several recipes making pizza crust with chickpea flour. It sounded easy.
From this assumption came the Chickpea Pizza Crust Disaster of 2014.
I put "chickpea crust pizza" on my cooking list for our summer vacation with friends in Michigan. I'm a pretty experienced cook so I thought, despite me never having made a single chickpea flour recipe that it would be a breeze. The doughy mess that took much, much too long to make that left us everyone forlorn and hungry that resulted turned me off from ever cooking with chickpea flour again. Well, I did try again, a chickpea flour pancake. Which was heavy and flavorless. DONE.
But I got lured in one more time when I saw this recipe for chickpea omelettes. I was looking for new meal ideas. I found several surfing around the internet and this one was my lowest choice, but it made it onto the list. We still had a bunch of chickpea flour from my brick-like chickpea pancake experiment, might as well try to use it up.
And the results were wonderful! These are soooo quick and easy, much quicker and easier than it even sounded to me in the recipe. It's truly like making pancakes, really quick ones.
This powdered mix does not look particularly promising, but the results are actually awesome!
My first deviation from the recipe is was pre-cooking all my vegetables. The author suggests there is no need to pre-cook the veggies but I disagree, they will release a lot of water and I prefer they do it before I put them into my omelette. My second deviation was the addition feta. These would be great vegan as well, but the addition of the feta was lovely. Last, we added sauce. The sauce made these pop. For the filling you can really used a 1/2 cup to 1 cup of any cooked vegetables minced up fine.
You can find the original recipe here: http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2014/12/chickpea-omelet-mix.html
I love Organic Valley and I love feta. It takes such a little bit to add a lot of flavor, making it long-lasting and economical to use.
Most important, make sure the batter is thin and spread the mix out super thin in the pan, like this:
The results:
Mediterranean Chickpea Omelettes
The omelette mix:
- 1 1/2 cups chickpea flour
- 3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
- 3 tablespoons ground flax seed
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon ground sumac
- 1 teaspoon salt (if desired)
- 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
The filling:
- 1 T of canola or olive oil
- 1/3 of a red onion, minced fine
- 2 big handfuls of baby spinach, then mince
- 10-12 kalamata olives, minced
The sauce:
- 1/2 cup tahini
- juice of one lemon
- salt and pepper
- pinch of cayenne
Toppings (optional):
- 1/2 cup of diced tomatoes
- 3 oz of feta
Put all the dry ingredients for the mix in an air tight container and mix well with a fork. Set aside.
Put the oil in a frying pan and heat over medium heat. Once the oil is hot add the onion, cook for two minutes, then add the spinach and olives. Cook another minute until the spinach is fully wilted. Set aside.
For the sauce put all of the ingredients in a mason jar and mix with a fork or lid and shake until well combined. The resulting sauce will be like a clotted cream, if you'd like it thinner add a tablespoon of water and mix in well to thin the texture.
Mix 2/3 cup of the omelette mix with 2/3 cup water, mix together well with a fork. Add in the pre-cooked vegetables. The texture of the mixture with the veggies are in it should be like thin pancake batter. If it's not, add another tablespoon of water and mix in. Keep adding a little water at a time until you have that thin pancake batter texture, it's important that the batter is thin, this is key.
If your fry pan is not non-stick or a very well seasoned cast iron, oil the pan with a tsp or two of oil. Heat the pan over medium high heat for a minute, then add 1/4 of the omelette mix to the pan. Working quickly, use the back of a spoon to spread the mixtures as thinly as possible. Let the omelette cook for a minute on one side then check the bottom with a spatula. You're looking for the bottom to be lightly browned. Once it is, flip it and cook on the other side for another minute or so until both sides are lightly browned. Put on a plate and cover to keep warm until all omelettes are complete, four in all.
Crumble the feta over the omelettes then spread out the chopped tomatoes evenly among the omelettes. Place a generous dollop of the sauce on each omelette. Enjoy!
Again, this sounds so much more complicated than it is, it's very quick! And the powered mix can be kept covered in the fridge pretty much indefinitely, just add the water and cooked veggies and fry up like pancakes, topping optional!
The delicious results. So, so good. So cheap.
