How to Cook Chickpeas From Dried

We soak and cook chickpeas every week in three kitchens. Here is the method, the timing, and the two mistakes that ruin more batches than anything else.

Dried or canned: the honest answer

Canned chickpeas are fine. If you are making a quick weeknight salad or throwing a handful into a soup, open the can and get on with your life. Nobody at Glory Bound will judge you.

But if you are making hummus, dried chickpeas are not a preference. They are the difference between hummus that tastes like something and hummus that tastes like paste. Cooking from dried gives you control over exactly how soft the chickpea gets, and softness is the single biggest factor in whether hummus turns out silky or grainy. A canned chickpea is cooked to a standard that keeps it intact in the can. For hummus you want it cooked well past that point, to where it collapses under light pressure from a spoon.

You also get the cooking liquid, which is worth more than most people realize. We come back to that below.

What you are actually buying

There are two broad types of chickpea, and American grocery stores mostly stock one of them. The large, round, cream-colored chickpea is the Kabuli type. That is what you find in cans and in most bulk bins, and it is what hummus is traditionally made from. The Desi type is smaller, darker, and more angular, with a thicker seed coat and an earthier flavor. Desi chickpeas dominate in India and Ethiopia, are often split and sold as chana dal, and behave differently in cooking — they hold their shape longer and never get quite as creamy.^[1]

For hummus, buy Kabuli. For a stew where you want the chickpeas to stay distinct, Desi is an interesting choice.

One thing that matters more than variety: buy chickpeas that have not been sitting on a shelf for two years. Old dried legumes never fully soften no matter how long you cook them. If a bag has been in your pantry since a vague point in the past and the chickpeas are still hard after ninety minutes of simmering, they are not undercooked. They are old. Throw them out and buy fresh ones.

The soak

Cover the chickpeas with cold water by at least three inches. They will roughly double in size and they will absorb more water than you expect, so be generous. Leave them on the counter for eight to twelve hours, or overnight.

Add a half teaspoon of baking soda per cup of dried chickpeas to the soaking water. This is the step most home recipes leave out and it is the one that makes the biggest difference. Baking soda raises the pH of the water, which helps break down the pectin in the chickpea's skin and cell walls. The practical result is chickpeas that cook faster, soften more completely, and shed their skins more readily. If you have ever wondered why restaurant hummus is smoother than yours, this is a large part of the answer.

If you forgot to soak, you have two options. The quick soak is to bring the chickpeas to a boil in plenty of water, boil for two minutes, then cover and let them sit off the heat for an hour. It works. It does not work quite as well as an overnight soak, and the texture is marginally less even. The other option is to cook them unsoaked, which takes roughly twice as long and gives you the least consistent result of the three.

The cook

Drain the soaking water and rinse. Do not cook chickpeas in their soaking water — it holds the compounds that make legumes hard to digest, and it will make your finished dish taste flat.

Cover the drained chickpeas with fresh cold water by two inches. Add another half teaspoon of baking soda. Bring to a boil, then immediately reduce to a bare simmer. A hard rolling boil will beat the chickpeas apart and cloud your cooking liquid; you want the surface barely moving.

Skim the foam that rises in the first ten minutes. It is protein and loose skins, and it is not harmful, but removing it gives you a cleaner-tasting result.

Do not salt the water until the chickpeas are nearly tender. Salt added early slows down softening. Add it in the last fifteen minutes and be generous — chickpeas are bland and they need it.

Those times are a starting point, not a rule. Age of the bean, hardness of your water, and altitude all shift them. Start testing at forty-five minutes and keep testing.

The two mistakes

Undercooking. This is the big one, and it is almost always the reason homemade hummus is grainy. A chickpea that is pleasant to eat out of the pot is still too firm for hummus. You want it past pleasant, into the range where it feels almost overcooked. Squeeze one between your thumb and finger — it should smear, not crumble. If there is any resistance at the center, keep going.

Throwing away the cooking liquid. That cloudy water is called aquafaba, and it is full of dissolved starch and protein. It is the correct liquid for thinning hummus, because it thins without diluting flavor the way plain water does and without breaking the emulsion the way cold water can. Save at least two cups. It also freezes well.

Whether to peel

Chickpea skins are the reason hummus can feel slightly gritty even when the chickpeas are properly cooked. Removing them produces a noticeably silkier result.

The honest position is that it depends on how much you care. If you cooked with baking soda, a good number of skins will have already floated free during cooking, and you can skim most of them off. Rubbing the warm cooked chickpeas between two clean kitchen towels loosens most of the rest in about two minutes. Peeling every last one by hand is a twenty-minute job for a pound of chickpeas and it does produce the best texture. We are not going to tell you it makes no difference, because it does. We are going to tell you that a properly overcooked chickpea with the skins skimmed off gets you ninety percent of the way there.

Storing

Cooked chickpeas keep in the refrigerator for about four days, submerged in their cooking liquid in a sealed container. Storing them in the liquid matters — chickpeas stored dry develop a leathery skin within a day.

They freeze well for up to three months. Freeze them in their liquid, in portions you will actually use. One thing worth knowing: freezing softens them further, so chickpeas you froze for a salad may come out too soft for that purpose but perfect for hummus.

Why we bother

Three kitchens, every week, from dried. It would be faster to open cans. We do it because hummus made from properly cooked dried chickpeas is a different food from hummus made from canned ones, and hummus is not a side dish for us — it is the thing a lot of people come in for.

The nutrition case is real too. Research analyzing national dietary data found that people who eat chickpeas or hummus consume substantially more fiber than those who do not, at 24.4 grams a day versus 10.1, and score meaningfully higher on overall diet quality.^[1] That same work put hummus at a nutrient-density score of 98.42, against 23.02 for ranch dressing — a useful number to keep in mind when choosing what to put next to the vegetables on a party tray.

What we do with them

Every batch of hummus in our kitchens starts from the same Original recipe, and that base includes California olive oil. Because all eight of our flavors build from that base, the olive oil is in every one of them — Original, Chipotle Lime, Garlic-Basil, Jalapeño-Cilantro, Mediterranean Olive, Roasted Red Pepper, Spicy Cajun, and Spinach-Pesto.

The oil we use is the same one we bottle and sell: Glory Bound Extra Virgin Olive Oil, pressed in California by a family-run grower and miller we have bought from for years. If you want to make hummus that tastes like ours, that is the specific ingredient to match. You can find it alongside the rest of the range in our olive oil collection.

Now that you have a pot of properly cooked chickpeas, the next question is what to do with them. We wrote up nine things worth making, including the hummus method itself.

References

[1] Wallace TC, Murray R, Zelman KM. "The Nutritional Value and Health Benefits of Chickpeas and Hummus." Nutrients, 2016;8(12):766.