Falafel Night

Since it was Yom Yerushalayim, we decided to make falafel.

I've never made falafel before, and since Alton Brown has never done a show on falafel, I didn't know how to do it right. All I knew was that you used chickpeas and fried them. I consulted the Internet, which told me that falafel boils down to the following:

1. You can't use canned chickpeas, you have to soak them (some people put baking soda in the water)
2. You can either use just chickpeas, or a combo of chickpeas and fava beans
3. Your falafel dough can either have flour, or have no flour

All the rest is seasoning.

I soaked a bag of chickpeas overnight, and ground them up in the food processor with onions, garlic, salt, parsley, cumin, and maybe some other stuff. Doesn't really matter. Some people put in cilantro but I don't like it.

The "batter" was way too loose; no way was it going to stick together in the fryer, so I chose to add a couple tablespoons of flour. This got the batter to stick together, but it was way too doughy.

I also made the pita from scratch. I followed a recipe I found on Youtube with some woman making it in her kitchen (that's all I remember). It was 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of water, yeast and sugar. Let rise for 1 hour, roll into circles, let rise for another 20 minutes, bake.

My pitas did not form pockets. I blame this on not kneading the dough. The woman on the video didn't either, but I should have known better. You always knead dough. My pitas ended up kind of hard and not chewy. They weren't terrible, but they were not great.

In conclusion, I will do a few things differently next time. First of all, I didn't put enough water over the chickpeas when I set them up to soak overnight. In the morning, they had soaked it all up and I had to add more. So have plenty of water for them to soak in. Second of all, I'm going to try putting in 1 tsp of baking soda into the soaking water. Hopefully these two things will make the dough sticky enough to fry without adding flour.

And as for the pitas – I'm going to knead the dough! And bake them on a cookie sheet set on top of a baking stone, not directly on the baking stone like I did this time. That way, I can let them rise those last 20 minutes on the cookie sheet itself, and I won't have to transfer them.