The towel is what makes roasted chickpeas crunch

You want a snack that holds you until dinner. Something salty and crunchy that won't send you back to the pantry an hour later.

That's a lot to ask of a snack. But one can of chickpeas, a spoon of oil and a hot oven get you close. And the people of ancient Rome got there first…

More than 2,000 years ago, the poet Horace poked fun at the cheap seats in a guide to writing for the stage. He calls the crowd there the buyers of roasted chickpeas and nuts.

So roasted chickpeas were a cheap Roman snack. Farmers near its wild home in southeastern Turkey most likely tamed it about 10,000 years ago.

One Roman even carried the bean in his name. The Latin word for chickpea is cicer. Plutarch wrote that an ancestor of Cicero had a small dent at the tip of his nose, like the cleft in a chickpea.

Here's that snack, made in your own oven…

Why Each Step Earns Its Place

Start with the towel. Most recipes rush it, and it's the step that decides the crunch.

A chickpea from the can is wet inside and out. In the oven, that water has to leave as steam before the skin can dry and go crisp. Wet ones steam. Dry ones roast.

The oil helps the heat crisp the skin and helps the salt stick. Paprika goes on last, off the heat, so it doesn't scorch on a 425-degree pan. The lemon matters for the iron, as you'll see…

What One Cup Carries

Take a look at the numbers. Per the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one cup of cooked chickpeas holds about 14.5 grams of protein and 12.5 grams of fiber, for about 270 calories.

That cup also gives you about 282 micrograms of folate, a B vitamin. The National Institutes of Health sets the adult goal at 400 micrograms a day, so one cup covers about 70 percent of it.

Then there's iron. A cup holds about 4.7 milligrams. If you're a man, or a woman 51 or older, the goal is 8 milligrams a day, so one cup gives you more than half.

But plant iron is the harder kind to absorb. The same agency notes that phytate, a compound in beans and grains, holds it back, while vitamin C helps it in. That's the lemon's job.

The Slow Starch

Most of the carbs in a chickpea are starch. But bean starch is built differently. Guy Crosby of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health wrote in 2015 that part of it is amylose, a tightly packed form that resists digestion.

Some of it gets past digestion entirely and reaches your colon, where gut germs feed on it. Call it the slow starch from here on.

It's a small share. Crosby puts the slow starch in fully cooked beans at about 4 to 5 percent of their dry weight. A night in the fridge nudges that to 5 to 6 percent, and canned beans carry about the same.

So how slowly does the rest get in? The glycemic index ranks foods by how fast they raise blood sugar, with pure glucose set at 100. In the 2008 world tables from Fiona Atkinson, Kaye Foster-Powell and Jennie Brand-Miller, printed in the journal Diabetes Care, boiled chickpeas scored 28.

There's a catch in that same study. When people ate hummus with a big serving of white bread, the total rise in blood sugar was not much different from the bread alone. Hummus doesn't cancel out the bread.

In 2023, a team at Woosuk University in South Korea reviewed 10 small trials, with 182 healthy adults in all. Where they could pool the data, chickpeas raised blood sugar less after a meal than potatoes, pasta or wheat did.

All of them were short, and none tested people with diabetes…

The Fullness Trials, And Who Paid

Does a chickpea snack keep you full?

In 2020, Evan Reister of Purdue University and Heather Leidy of the University of Texas at Austin tested it on 39 healthy adults. For six days at a time, each person ate hummus and pretzels in the afternoon, or granola bars with the same 240 calories, or no snack at all.

On hummus days, hunger fell about 70 percent compared with no snack. People ate about 20 percent less dessert in the evening. Afternoon blood sugar ran about 5 percent lower than after the granola bars.

But total calories for the day came out the same in all three patterns. And the money came from Sabra. Leidy sits on the company's science advisory board.

A longer trial came from the University of Tasmania. In 2010, a team including Jane Pittaway and Madeleine Ball had 42 adults add about 104 grams of chickpeas a day for 12 weeks.

They ate less of everything else, grain foods most of all. Most said they felt fuller and their bowels worked better, by their own report. After they stopped, they drifted back toward packaged snacks, a trend that fell short of firm proof.

A trial of roasted chickpeas as a snack is on record too, but I couldn't find its results.

Three Things Worth Knowing At The Stove

Horace poked fun at the people in the cheap seats with their roasted chickpeas. The joke aged badly. They had the better snack.

A cup carries real protein, real fiber and most of a day's folate. A hummus maker paid for two of the studies here, and you deserve to know that too.

Dry a can of chickpeas on a towel tonight. Roast them hot, and eat them warm.

Stay well,
The Healing Plate