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Like most working people, I don’t have the time (or honestly, the foresight) to take out dried chickpeas, soak them overnight, rinse them, cook them, cool them, and THEN put them in a salad. I’m cooking dinner, not caring for a pet. So I cheat a little with canned chickpeas.
While on a recent grocery run for smoothie ingredients and cold brew (yes, even in the winter), I spotted frozen chickpeas in the cold storage. Frozen peas are way better than the metallic, slimy kind in cans—would their hipper, hummus-making cousins also be better?
I did some tasting and ran some numbers. Here’s what I found.
Using Instacart, I looked at prices for both frozen and canned organic chickpeas at Whole Foods. While you can find canned chickpeas at the supermarket for under a dollar, the frozen variety is only available as organic and high quality. So, for a fair comparison, I looked at only organic varieties of canned chickpeas, too.
I found a 15-ounce can of Whole Foods brand organic chickpeas is around $1.29, around 9 cents an ounce, while a 1-pound bag of frozen chickpeas is $3.99, around 25 cents an ounce. So canned is definitely cheaper. But maybe you get what you pay for?
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On their own, frozen chickpeas have a slightly grainy texture and lack the more buttery mouthfeel of the canned chickpeas, but it wasn’t an enormous difference. I took a very rudimentary canned-chickpea hummus recipe and made two batches: one with canned beans and one with thawed frozen.
I was blown away with how much of a difference the two had. The hummus from canned was smoother, and the taste of paprika and garlic really shone, while the frozen variety flavors were a lot more muted, even though I used the same quantity in both. The frozen also suffered from a tackier texture, even after adding 2 tablespoons of water. Epi's Adina Steiman was the only team member here that preferred the frozen, saying the canned had a “tinned sour legume taste.”
With the higher price and grittier texture, I’m just not a fan of frozen chickpeas. They’re not superior to canned, like regular peas. Since I usually reach for the chickpeas when I have no time to cook (or am too tired), having to wait for thawing is also a set back.
For now, I’m going to preserve my freezer space for international ingredients and for freezing bananas for ice cream. As for chickpeas, I'll stick with the canned.
