Cooking question: I adore chickpeas, but...

[PeterB]

Janit wrote:
[quote=PeterB]
[quote=btfc]
How long did you soak?

Have you thought about Hummus?

Soaked overnight. And I think about hummus ALL the TIME. Dammit! Now you've got me wanting to make some. :yum:

Janit wrote:
Treating this as a matter of biochemistry I see the following issues:

1) How effective is soaking at leaching out the polysaccharides? Is there a better way to do this?

2) How much maceration is necessary to get effective enzymatic digestion? Is it enough to cook until soft, and then incubate at 55 degrees with alpha-galactosidase for some time, or is it better to puree and then incubate? Are other enzymes also necessary to digest the polysaccharides?

3) Is there an easy way to assay the level of polysaccharides remaining in the chick peas after preparation? This might also make it possible to quantify what level of polysaccharides your gut can tolerate.

This sounds like a perfect pandemic project if you are missing the lab. And the results would surely qualify for submission to the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Another approach would be to breed or engineer gasless chickpeasmiley-excited001:

Yep... I was thinking about this from the biochem perspective too. I did soaks where I was replacing the water fairly frequently (this is the recommended method from the USDA), but the problem -- as I see it -- is that you could still have a lot of the oligosaccharide hiding inside the intact beans. That's why I was thinking about grinding them up, THEN soaking.

And soaking/cooking at the higher temp, using an enzyme, might do it... since the enzyme is optimal at 55oC. The Zygest-13 supplement I posted also has hemicellulase enzyme, which may work on these damned oligosaccharides.

And breeding or developing gasless legumes would be pretty cool and not too hard, now that we can all be doing CRISPR at home. miley-excited001:
Ah, you answered before I made my final edit:

Finally, I wonder if it would be possible to brew a chickpea beer, thereby converting all those nasty polysaccharides into ethanol?
Actually, isn't that really what yeast are doing with flour in a sourdough starter? Fermenting the carbs to ethanol and CO2?

I'm really now wondering if I should try cooking the chickpeas in the Instant Pot with enzyme added. The 55oC is easily achievable in an Instant Pot, and supposedly you can go from dry to cooked chickpeas in 40 minutes-- though I would think longer is better in terms of enzymatic activity, so maybe slow, rather than fast, pressure cooking.

[jesse]

Have you tried pre-soaking with the Instant Pot?

I use this method when cooking pinto beans and it seems to solve the gassy issue.

I think it's 4 cups of water/cup of beans, cook for 3 minutes, then release pressure after 10 minutes.

[PeterB]

jesse wrote:
Have you tried pre-soaking with the Instant Pot?

I use this method when cooking pinto beans and it seems to solve the gassy issue.

I think it's 4 cups of water/cup of beans, cook for 3 minutes, then release pressure after 10 minutes.

Haven't tried this, but it's along the same lines as what I was suggesting: to soak / cook them for an extended period, adding enzyme to the mix (which couldn't hurt, I don't think). Cooking chickpeas in an Instant Pot without soaking DOES take a lot longer than 3 minutes though, here's an example: https://detoxinista.com/instant-pot-chickpeas/ ... she's doing it for 50 minutes, I've seen other pages that say 40. It would also be nice to know what temperature it gets inside the Instant Pot, or better yet, if you could set it for a specific temperature, so that the enzyme can do its thing.

Edit: the Instant Pot manual suggests that the "Keep Warm" setting is still a bit too much on the hot side for the enzyme -- 68-73oC. https://instantpot.com/wp-content/upload...nglish.pdf

[jesse]

Sorry, it's actually 4 minutes, with natural pressure release (about 10 minutes). I have only done this with Pinto Beans (the instructions are in the recipe book with the refried beans recipe).

After the 4 minute pre-soak, you do still need to cook the beans for at least another 10 minutes, I'm guessing chickpeas would be longer.

Enzymes might be the why to go, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that beans pre-soaked, then cooked in my Instant Pot resulted in much less gas and bloating.

I do love Chickpeas, I'll have to try this method with them.

[PeterB]

jesse wrote:
Sorry, it's actually 4 minutes, with natural pressure release (about 10 minutes). I have only done this with Pinto Beans (the instructions are in the recipe book with the refried beans recipe).

After the 4 minute pre-soak, you do still need to cook the beans for at least another 10 minutes, I'm guessing chickpeas would be longer.

Enzymes might be the why to go, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that beans pre-soaked, then cooked in my Instant Pot resulted in much less gas and bloating.

I do love Chickpeas, I'll have to try this method with them.

I can certainly try the pre-soak and then change the water out for the actual cooking, but I'm still thinking that if I could set the Instant Pot for a lower temp, that'd be better because you don't want to kill the enzymes.

Like I said, I made some incredible pasta with chickpeas ... tasted great, but the gas was beyond belief, and that was WITH an overnight pre-soak and using my enzyme supplement when I ate them.