Good Eats at the TEOTWAWKI Café--Chickpea Gingersnaps

Preparing for the coming challenges while taking into account our personal limitations demands everything we’ve got.  I certainly don’t feel the need to take on any more challenges, including preparing for special diets.  I feel for those who have dietary challenges, but I don’t have the time or expertise to explore solutions.  That’s a topic for someone else.

And yet, I’m also aware of the fact that food allergies and sensitivities can strike at any time.  My father-in-law has celiac disease, and so do a couple of his children.  I’m aware that it is a genetic issue.  How likely are my husband and children to develop it?  According to the Celiac Disease Foundation, first-degree relatives have a 10% chance of developing celiac themselves.  I am gradually getting persuaded that preparing for that possibility with at least a couple of recipes merits consideration. 

Socca, a bread made with chickpea (also known as garbanzo beans) flour, is really pretty tasty.  I made it a few years back, and got to wondering why I hadn’t made it again.  And so I decided it was time to try out another gluten-free recipe featuring chickpeas.  And I was reminded exactly why I hadn’t made socca again.  It takes my grinder forever to mill the beans into flour.  I am hoping that in the future I will be able to quickly run the beans through my manual Country Living grain mill to make them just a little smaller so that they will feed more quickly through the Nutrimill that I use every day. 

Chickpea Gingersnaps

2 cups chickpea flour

2 ½ teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

6 tablespoons coconut oil, melted

¾ cup brown sugar

1 egg

¼ cup molasses

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

3-4 tablespoons granulated sugar

In a medium bowl, whisk the first seven ingredients together.

In a large bowl, cream the coconut oil and brown sugar until smooth. Add the egg, molasses, and vanilla and beat well.

Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, mixing until just combined. Form the dough into a log and wrap it well in waxed paper.  Refrigerate for at least one hour or up to two days. 

Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Put the sugar in a shallow bowl.

Roll spoonfuls of dough into balls and then coat each ball evenly with sugar.  Place each ball on an ungreased cookie sheet about 2" apart.

Bake 10 minutes. Let cookies cool for 5-10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack

Family reviews:  Do not overbake these.  We can overbake our regular gingersnaps by several minutes without too much issue.  These gingersnaps will be really hard if overbaked by 3-5 minutes.  Take them out of the oven promptly.  (Yes, of course I messed up and left a sheet of cookies in the oven too long.  How’d you know?)

None of us—Aaron, KOTPE (King of the Picky Eaters), QOTPE (Queen….), Buttercup, Blueberry Girl, Ellie and I--would ever guess that they are gluten-free.  We don’t like them better than our regular gingersnap cookies, but these taste totally acceptable.  I’d choose these over a store-bought counterpart any day.

Unfortunately, as noted above, it takes forever to grind the chickpeas into flour.  For that reason alone, even if we liked these better than our regular gingersnaps, I wouldn’t make them again.  It took probably 45 minutes to grind 3 cups of flour, and that was with me frequently pushing the beans into the grinder.  Give me a source of prepared chickpea flour and I’d make them again in a heartbeat. 

Links to related posts:

Socca