chickpeas as a leaf vegetable

[hortusbrambonii]

Does anyone here have experience with chickpeas as a leaf vegetable?

Looks like they are eaten as such in parts of the world, and quite nutritious:
www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=138151

(The power of google clicking, I was looking on sprouting them since I just bought a small bag of brown (deli?) chickpeas, and I came unto this article abstract.)

I'm quite new to eating fabaceae as greens; I've been eating pea sprouts this winter and they were quite good for a vegetable grown inside in the half-dark of the kitchen. Are there other legumes you would recommend for human consumption as greens, and not just as mature, immature or sprouted seed or pods?

[oxbowfarm]

That is very interesting. I've also read that people harvest the sour leaf exudate using cloth somehow then they rinse the cloth in water to make a sour drink? The leaves are very sour if it hasn't rained too long before you taste them.

[raymondo]

Fenugreek. I grow it over autumn and winter for use as a cooking green. Nice for something a little different.
Cornucopia II by Stephen Facciola lists a number of leguminous plants used for greens. Among them peanuts, pigeon pea, jack bean, sword bean, chipilin (crotalaria), soybean, hyacinth bean, chickling vetch, various medics as well as the better known broad bean and pea.

[steev]

Certainly pea tips and fava tips are good greens. Chickpeas? I suppose one must boldly go where one hasn't before, on occasion.

Reading that report, I would suppose Cicer leaves might be a better pot-herb, than greens, per se.

Really, it appears that humans, when having more abundant food supplies, will reduce the food sources that are used. Of course, there is also the issue of return-on-investment (right, agribiz), but why do we so easily give up knowledge of what we CAN do, just because it isn't what we WANT/NEED to do?

[steev]

Ray: do the fenugreek greens still taste like maple, or are they more greenish?

[raymondo]

Like maple? I hadn't thought of that connection but now that you mention it, yes, I guess they do, a little. They taste like the seeds but are milder and have grassy undertones with a slight bitterness.

[MikeH]

May 10, 2013 4:17:12 GMT -5 hortusbrambonii said:

www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=138151

See attached,

Attachments:

[zeedman]

Interesting... although I have tried leaves of winged bean & yardlong beans, I would never have considered eating chickpea leaves, given their high acid content (although spinach & chard also have oxalic acid). Having grown garbanzos, I can say that it would take forever to gather enough for a mouthful of cooked leaves. That could be why the authors of the study stated "...Consumption of chickpea leaves should be promoted in areas where chickpea is produced as a staple grain" (emphasis mine).

But then, I can't criticize the labor-intensive harvest of small leaves, since I grow Moringa.

I note that the study also reduced the leaves to ash for nutritional analysis. This allowed measurements of mineral content, but organic compounds (such as the acids) would have been destroyed. Notably, it doesn't appear that they actually tasted the leaves either.

[steev]

Science so often leaves out the obvious, just because it isn't "scientific". We really need to meld science with "real" life, for the benefit of both.

[hortusbrambonii]

All those unscientific unimportant details... Why would anyone even think about tasting a potentially interesting vegetable?

[steev]

Because climate or human activity has left them potentially in famine? Simple curiousity seems so nerdish, so we won't admit to that.

[hortusbrambonii]

Like zeedman says, "it would take forever to gather enough for a mouthful of cooked leaves"...

After trying to grow chickpeas this summer and seeing the size of the leaves, I don't think it actually would ever be a profitable green to grow anyway. Or is it just because I tried to grow some obscure small dark-green and brown desi chickpeas from the Nepalese store? I suppose the biggest fattest kabuli-type would still have very fiddly small leaves with not enough biomass to do anything with it in the kitchen.

(It isn't growing well either, I suppose they need more sun and less shade, or more water, or less water, or less Belgium, ... I don't know. It's not a plant that works for me...)

The young shoots, grown in half-dark like I do with regular pea shoots (or favas), are quite fine though to add to salads or Asian-style wok dishes, and they indeed have a hint of acid when raw.

[blueadzuki]

I sort of depends on the type. Kabouli type plants do indeed tend to be a bit larger, but their usually also lankier so the actual amount of leaf biomass is probably roughly the same. I suppose you could try with a very LARGE desi type (like Monk's Morrocan) and hope it had larger size while retaining desi density, but even that would probably be a gamble.

[steev]

I think relying on chickpeas as a farming choice is questionable, at best. Expecting them to provide your protein, carbs, and vitamins is pretty irrational. There are many crops that will provide for these needs much better. Not to even bring up the subject of diversified farming or seasonal foraging.