Chickpea Cutlets

Meant to put this up last night, but I fell asleep while studying*.

I bought my copy of Veganomicon almost 2 years ago, a month or two after it came out. I can't believe it took 22 months for me to finally make the chickpea cutlets. I decided to make up for it by quadrupling the recipe.

I decided to use the food processor to deal with my chickpeas, since all the beans I've cooked lately have been on the hard side. 

Protip: Don't use frozen beans. Defrosted ones will get beat up faster. About a third or so of the beans were still frozen solid, so they were in bigger chunks. 

I whirred them around for about 20-30 seconds. I think that's a bit slow, but on the other hand, it's a tiny machine, I overfilled it, and they were really hard.

After two batches of beans, I dumped them all in a bowl.

I added all the other ingredients: vital wheat gluten, bread crumbs, paprika, thyme, basil, soy sauce, vegetable broth (I tried to whisk in a bouillon... it was semi-effective). Then I stirred everything together and hauled it downstairs.

Down there, I kneaded the dough a bit, then separated it into two halves, which were further separated. Pictured above are two quarters of the dough.

Further separated them into eighths. The bigger chickpeas that fell off were from the frozen batch.

Then the eighths into sixteenths, which I smooshed down to form cutlet-shapes.

I put them on a baking sheet, stuck them in the oven, flipped them at 20 minutes, and took them out at 30.

They reminded me of chicken fingers (mystery chicken meat! oh, the things we do in childhood), so I ate them with ketchup. I might pretty them up tonight if I feel like it with some sort of sauce or something, but I'm not sure I'm going to be up to it.


*Before I got to that part, really...