Spiced chickpeas

Name: Spiced chickpeas (Balilah)
Yield: Serves four as a salad or six as part of a spread
Cuisine: Israeli
Ingredients: 1½ tsp coriander seeds, lightly toasted and roughly crushed in a pestle and mortar; 1½ tsp cumin seeds, lightly toasted and roughly crushed in a pestle and mortar; 2 lemons; 200 g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight in twice their volume of water and 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (or 2 × 400 g tins of cooked chickpeas, as an alternative); 75 ml olive oil; 10 g parsley leaves, roughly chopped, plus a few extra leaves to serve; 10 g mint leaves, roughly torn, plus a few extra leaves to serve; 3 spring onions, thinly sliced (30 g); 1 tsp Aleppo chilli flakes (or ½ tsp regular chilli flakes); ½ red onion, very finely chopped (70 g); Salt and black pepper

Balilah

Preparation info

Serves
four
as a salad or six as part of a spread

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Falastin

By Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley

Published 2020

About

As a kid, Sami used to snack on balilah on the way home from school in East Jerusalem. Traditionally, it’s a street-food snack piled into cone-shaped newspaper packages and served warm, but it also works as a salad, served warm or at room temperature. As a salad, it works with all sorts of things: some grilled fish or chicken with a simple green salad or just wedges of roasted butternut squash, for example.

Getting ahead: This is served either warm, soon after assembly, or at

Ingredients

Asia
Palestine
East Jerusalem
Snack
Vegan
Gluten-free
Spicy

Ingredients

Method