A team of researchers from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Albany, CA, has produced puffed legume snacks using extrusion technology and a water-based slurry of pea and lentil flours, starches, fiber and other functional ingredients. The team’s procedure solves a problem that had plagued earlier attempts to extrude legumes—namely, their high protein content—with the general protein content of the pulses, including peas, chickpeas and lentils, running somewhere in the 20% to 30% range. “Whenever you deal with high protein, then you’ve got a problem,” explains Juming “Jimmy” Tang, Ph.D., part of the food engineering group in the university’s department of biological systems engineering. “It won’t expand very well. It becomes gummy inside the extruder barrel.” But the ingredient combination and process they use achieves a range of puff sizes—they’ve managed 20-fold expansion—while keeping costs attractively low. And because the entire process takes place in the extruder, “You don’t need to prefry,” Tang adds. “You don’t need a lot of oil or stuff, just the raw ingredients and a certain amount of water.”
Tang compares the products they’ve made to standard puffed breakfast cereals. “We can make snack balls, too,” he adds, as well as what he describes as a “nugget shape.” And, whereas breakfast cereals made with the pea and lentil puffs might do well with a sweet coating, the extruded snacks suit themselves to savory applications, too. Tang foresees cheese, curry, chile spice and similar flavor profiles.
Flour power
Indian cooks have developed a lengthy repertoire of bean snacks using ground bean and pea flours. One of the more famous examples is dosa, which Aliza Green, author of “The Bean Bible: A Legumaniac’s Guide to Lentils, Peas, and Every Edible Bean on the Planet,” describes as “large, lacy, ground split-pea and rice pancakes flavored with onions, cilantro and fresh ginger.” Other dal-flour flatbreads include the crispy lentil wafers called pappdum, and dhokla, a ginger- and chile-seasoned treat made from a chickpea-flour batter that’s been steamed and cut into squares.
Green loves using chickpea flour for its nutty flavor, and her book gives recipes for chickpea-flour pizza; a chickpea version of the German dumplings, spätzle; and a traditional cookie from Tunisia. Chickpea flour also winds up in the South of France, where it’s the basis for two regional specialties: panisse and socca. To make the former, which resembles a French fry, chefs cook the chickpea batter polenta-style, spread it onto the surface of an oiled pan, and then cut it into strips for frying. Green likes to sprinkle her panisse with salt, pepper and Parmesan cheese and shoot them under the broiler for extra flavor. As for socca, also called socca niçoise after its Provençal provenance, it’s a thin tart made from chickpea flour.
Picking the right bean
Practical processing considerations often dictate bean choice. Janelle Sterner, research and development chef, Inland Empire Foods, Inc., Riverside, CA, asks some critical questions about the product to narrow the options: “Under what conditions must the ingredient perform? What is the target appearance of the final product? How will the other ingredients in the system interact? Will they compete for water, or change the pH?”
And what type of processing need the beans withstand? Fortunately for processors, legumes as a whole exhibit considerable resiliency in processed foods. Take the retort process: While it can play havoc with more delicate ingredients, it leaves beans virtually undamaged. But, as Brian Yager, corporate research chef, ADM, Decatur, IL, warns, “They can still be overcooked and overprocessed.” When they are, the first things to go are texture and appearance. “So if the beans get overcooked, then you’ll have problems with loss of identity and pumpability,” he says.