Chickpea Sandwich

                                                                                

      

Why is finding healthy and easy lunch recipes so hard? Alex and I like to eat extremely simple at breakfast and lunch, so that we can spend our time and energy on dinner recipes. So here’s one of our favorite easy lunch tricks ever: is this chickpea salad sandwich! It’s basically a vegetarian chicken salad sandwich (aka chickpea tuna salad!). It’s so tasty, it’s become one of our most popular chickpea recipes. Even our toddler Larson is a huge fan: he tries to sneak bites while we’re making it!                

                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                           

How to make a chickpea salad sandwich

This chickpea salad sandwich is truly easy to make: and we’re not just saying that. It takes just 10 minutes to whip up the chickpea salad and throw it onto a sandwich. The only cutting involved is thinly slicing some celery and green onions. Mix that up with some chickpeas, mashed with a fork, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and celery seed, and you’ve got a fresh, refreshing chickpea salad.

One note: you can use canned or cooked chickpeas for this chickpea salad sandwich. Our preference is canned chickpeas (see below), but both work. Here’s our Pressure Cooker chickpeas method if you happen to have an Instant Pot. If you don’t, use our How to Cook Dried Beans in a Dutch Oven (which includes chickpeas / garbanzo beans). However, if you do use canned chickpeas in this recipe, remember a few things

• Canned chickpeas have a bit of salt added, so you’ll want to flavor with a few pinches of kosher salt before using.
• The texture of chickpeas cooked at home can be drier than canned, so you may have to add a bit more mayonnaise to the chickpea salad. Because of this, we prefer making it with canned chickpeas. However, we’ve made it many times with cooked chickpeas too.
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• Toppings for this chickpea salad sandwich

• Here, we’ve kept the toppings pretty minimal for this chickpea tuna sandwich. We’ve used spring greens for some texture. A fun trick that we’ve used is spreading hummus onto the bread slices before assembling the sandwich. We happened to have it on hand and it made the sandwich even more delicious! Of course you could use mayonnaise, or also omit it. And if you’re up for a challenge, you could use our Homemade Sourdough Bread or Easy Dutch Oven Bread for the sandwich!