Do chickpeas need to be soaked before cooking?

Chickpeas can be cooked dry or pre-soaked in a pressure cooker. As with any other beans, garbanzos are easy to cook on the stove, slow cooker, or instant pot. If you end up having overcooked chickpeas on hand, here are some delicious ways to use them. If you like to cook large quantities of chickpeas and store them for future use, my favorite way to store them is in the freezer.

There are two ways to soak dried chickpeas, and whichever method you use, the chickpeas should soften and increase in volume. The recommended time is for chickpeas that are not soaked, since it is an optional step for pressure cooking. If you don't have time to soak the beans ahead of time, you can use this “quick soak” method, which shortens the total cooking time. The benefit of soaking beans quickly is that you can help eliminate some of those indigestible sugars that can cause digestive problems, and the beans will cook faster than if you didn't soak them at all.

But I also found that cooking them from scratch produces the best tender chickpeas with a creamy mouthfeel that the canned variety simply can't compete with. With all methods, I start with 1 pound of chickpeas (about 2 cups of dried chickpeas) and from there, the amount of water may change slightly. These are the instructions it says. In a large pot, place the chickpeas and 1 teaspoon of baking soda.

The time needed to cook dried chickpeas will depend on their size, freshness (beans can be stored for months or years) and cooking method. It took me years to learn how to cook chickpeas from scratch, so today I thought I'd share a quick tutorial to help make it less intimidating. In this recipe, I use 1 pound of dried chickpeas (about 2 cups), which yields nearly 6 cups of cooked chickpeas.