Recipe · SALAD
Chickpea Salad
This is a salad in the sense that it is served in a bowl with herbs in it. Most of what makes it worth eating happens in a hot oven, and depends on one thing: keeping water away from the tray.
Chickpeas out of a tin are wet, and wet food in an oven steams before it roasts. Drying them on a tea towel takes a minute and is the difference between chickpeas that tighten and take on a skin and chickpeas that stay soft and slightly slimy. The same logic applies to how much you put on the tray — crowd it and each piece is surrounded by the vapour coming off its neighbours, so nothing browns.
Dress it while it is still warm, but not hot. Warm food absorbs dressing; hot food wilts the parsley into something grey, and cold food just wears the dressing on the outside.
Recipe
Ingredients
For roasting
- 1 small cauliflower, in florets
- 1 tin chickpeas, about 400 g, drained and dried
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- Salt
To finish
- 30 g flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
- Seeds of half a pomegranate
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- Juice of half a lemon
- 1 tbsp tahini (optional)
- Flaky salt
Method
- Dry the chickpeas. Tip the drained chickpeas onto a tea towel and roll them about until they are properly dry. Damp chickpeas steam and stay soft.
- Season and spread. Heat the oven to 220°C fan. Toss the cauliflower and chickpeas with the oil, cumin, paprika and salt, then spread them in a single layer on a large tray.
- Roast. Roast for 25 minutes, shaking the tray once, until the cauliflower has dark edges and the chickpeas have tightened.
- Dress warm. Let it cool for 5 minutes only, then fold through the parsley and pomegranate and dress with the oil, lemon and tahini. Finish with flaky salt.
Worth knowing
- One layer, one large tray. Crowd them and everything steams — you get pale cauliflower and chickpeas with no skin on them.
- Roasting the chickpeas alongside rather than tipping them in from the tin gives them a surface that survives being dressed.