Crisp Falafel Wraps
Made from soaked dried chickpeas, never tinned — that is the one rule. Fried crisp and wrapped with salad and tahini.
Nutrition Info (per serving)
- 690
- Calories
- 24g
- Protein
- 32g
- Fat
- 76g
- Carbs
Ingredients
- 250 g dried chickpeas
- 1 onion
- 4 cloves garlic
- Large bunch parsley
- Large bunch coriander
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 tbsp plain flour
- 1 litre neutral oil, for frying
- 4 flatbreads
- 4 tbsp tahini
- 2 lemons
- 1 cucumber
- 2 tomatoes
- Salt and black pepper
Instructions
- 1Cover the dried chickpeas with plenty of cold water and leave them to soak for at least 12 hours, or overnight. They will roughly triple in size. Do not cook them — this is the single thing that decides whether falafel works.
- 2Drain the chickpeas thoroughly and pat them dry. Wet chickpeas make a wet mixture that falls apart in the oil.
- 3Roughly chop the onion and garlic. Pick the leaves and tender stalks from both bunches of herbs.
- 4Put the chickpeas, onion, garlic, herbs, cumin, ground coriander, 1.5 tsp salt and plenty of pepper in a food processor. Pulse in short bursts until it looks like coarse wet sand — grainy, not smooth. Over-processing gives a paste that fries dense and heavy.
- 5Tip into a bowl, stir through the baking powder and flour, cover and chill for 30 minutes. Resting lets the starch hydrate and firms the mixture up.
- 6Make the sauce: whisk the tahini with the juice of 1.5 lemons and a pinch of salt. It will seize; add cold water a tablespoon at a time until it pours like single cream.
- 7Dice the cucumber and tomatoes and dress with the remaining lemon juice and a pinch of salt.
- 8Shape the mixture into 16 walnut-sized balls, pressing each firmly between your palms so it holds.
- 9Heat the oil to 175C. Fry the falafel in batches of five or six for 3 to 4 minutes, turning, until deep brown and crisp. Crowding drops the temperature and they absorb oil instead of crisping.
- 10Drain on a wire rack, not paper.
- 11Warm the flatbreads, then fill each with falafel, the salad and a generous pour of tahini sauce.
There is one rule with falafel, and everything else is detail: you cannot make it from tinned chickpeas.
Soaked, never cooked
Dried chickpeas soaked overnight are still raw. They are hard, starchy and dry, and when blitzed they form a coarse mixture that holds together through the hydration of that raw starch and fries into something light with a crisp shell.
Cooked chickpeas — tinned or boiled — are soft and full of water. Blitzed, they form a purée closer to hummus. In hot oil that purée has nowhere for its moisture to go, and it disintegrates. Recipes that get around this by adding large amounts of flour produce dense, doughy fritters that are not really falafel.
There is no shortcut. Twelve hours of soaking, no cooking.
Coarse, not smooth
Pulse in short bursts and stop when the mixture looks like damp sand with visible chickpea fragments. That texture is what gives the inside its characteristic crumbly lightness.
Run the processor continuously and you get a smooth paste that fries heavy and pasty. It is a common and easily avoided mistake.
Herbs in quantity
Two full bunches sounds like a lot and is correct. The green interior of good falafel comes from herbs, not from anything else, and they are a primary ingredient rather than a garnish.
Parsley and coriander together is the usual Levantine combination. All parsley is fine; all coriander is more assertive.
Baking powder and the rest
A teaspoon of baking powder gives a small amount of lift, which keeps the inside from being solid. The flour binds. The thirty-minute chill lets everything hydrate and makes the balls much easier to shape without cracking.
If a test falafel breaks up in the oil, add another tablespoon of flour and chill for another ten minutes.
Oil temperature
175C is the target. Too cool and the falafel sits in the oil absorbing it before the crust forms — greasy and heavy. Too hot and the outside blackens while the centre stays raw and pasty.
A thermometer is worth using. Failing that, a small piece of the mixture should sizzle steadily and rise to the surface within a few seconds.
Nutrition
A wrap comes in around 690 calories with 24 grams of protein and a lot of fibre — chickpeas are among the better plant protein sources and a strong source of folate, iron and manganese.
Baking is possible: 200C for 25 minutes on an oiled tray, turning once. They come out drier and paler and it is a different food, but a decent one. The mixture also freezes raw, shaped, for two months.
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