Falafel

Here is my own recipe for falafel, a fried chickpea dish that can be a light snack or part of a meal. While falafel would typically be deep fried, I find that process messy and a pain to clean up, so I experimented a bit and have settled on a very quick and easy solution. This recipe was entirely developed from scratch by myself and is probably not entirely authentic.

Note: This recipe is on its fourth iteration; I do not consider it perfected yet, but it is ready to share with people in its current state. (My process for making recipes from scratch develops initial guesses into stable recipes over the course of many iterations.)

This recipe is in two parts:

  1. First, I make the uncooked mix in a rather-large batch. This keeps in the fridge for one or two weeks and can be pulled out at a moment’s notice.
  2. When I want to have falafel to eat, I form some of the mix into small pieces which I shallow-fry in a small amount of cooking oil.

Combined, this method lets me keep mix on hand to have fresh falafel ready about ten minutes after deciding I want some.

Ingredients

Similar to my Hummus recipe I’ve scaled this recipe around the base size of one cup of dry chickpeas; I usually make 1.5-2 times this, but starting with this as a base is easy to scale. None of these quantities are particularly exact, so you can tweak things to your tastes.

Making the Mix

  1. Soak the dried chickpeas in water for 6-8 hours or overnight. Alternatively, put the chickpeas in water, bring to a boil, turn off the heat, and let it sit for about one hour. Note: the chickpeas should not be cooked when put in the mix, only soaked.
  2. Drain and rinse the chickpeas.
  3. Put all ingredients in a food processor and blend them together. The texture should not be completely smooth when you’re done, but there shouldn’t be big pieces of anything. This may take some trial and error if you don’t know what falafel texture is like.
  4. The result should be able to be molded with your hands and to keep its shape.
  5. Store the result in the refrigerator between uses, and this should last at least 1-2 weeks.

Note that nothing in the mix is cooked; the frying process does the cooking. When experimenting with roasting chickpeas in the oven, I found that soaking them without cooking them (then letting the oven cook them by evaporating the water) produced much more consistent results, and I’ve pursued a similar strategy here.

Frying the Falafel

To prepare each piece, roll a small ball of the mix and flatten it. Flatter pieces will be crispier. Heat a frying pan with a small amount of oil (probably about one teaspoon per piece of falafel) and put the pieces you made in.

Cooking the pieces to be crispy without burning them will probably take some trial and error until you have some practice. You want each side browned and crispy, but not blackened. When first learning, flip each piece frequently to make sure they aren’t burnt—just give the pieces at least 30 seconds or so before flipping them to keep them from falling apart.

When each piece is done, transfer it onto a paper towel to absorb any extra oil.

This takes some practice, but is far quicker and cleaner than deep frying and uses only a little oil. If you have oil left over in the pan after all the pieces you made are cooked, it’s easy to make an extra piece or two to use it up; just be aware they will probably cook more quickly than the first set did. Similarly, if there isn’t enough oil during the cooking process, just add a bit more. Once you have it figured out, you won’t be wasting any oil (which is especially great given how troublesome cooking oil is to dispose of).

A favorite discovery of mine locally at Syrian food stalls has been falafel wraps: falafel wrapped up with hummus and vegetables. I make that sometimes using my own hummus recipe.