Chickpea Nuggets

You know how much I like things cheap and easy? Well, let me tell you about a recent discovery of mine called Burmese tofu.

Burmese tofu is a soy-free tofu type matter that uses gram flour instead of soy beans. I love gram flour and have been making a lot of socca or farinata style pancakes with it recently, so have a brand new, big, fat bag that I've been digging into to try and reduce it so it will fit in one of my nice jars and I'm hoping this recipe should help me achieve my jar fetish based goal!

Anyway, due to a stonking hangover this weekend needing a battered sausage cure, I had some corn and gram flour batter sitting idle - the munch stars had aligned - now was the time to make Burmese tofu nuggets.

And I did.

Now, my Burmese tofu doesn't look as smooth and silky as everyone else's what I've seen on the internet, but as I'm using it for nuggets, I'm OK with that. I don't like that too neat, overly processed look anyway, and it'll give it a more, chicken-y feel when torn into pieces. My mum ideally needs to switch to a plant based diet and despite being a fantastic cook, struggles with ideas and textures when it comes to vegan dishes, so I'm hoping the more nugget like it is, the easier she'll find it to swallow (boom boom!) when I lovingly force feed them to her whilst manically grinning later this evening.

Anyway, it's well easy and makes loads, despite me eating chunks of it as I went along. I only battered half(ish) of the lot, the rest I left as was and used in a stir fry and it was amazing. You could also blatantly use it in sandwiches, salads, noodle pots, with roast dinners. And I reckon experimenting with some different flavourings I could probably have it with every meal. I mean, I'm not going to...ah, who am I kidding? I'm all over this shizzle!

Anyway, check out my brand new staple!

Chickpea Nuggets

serves 6, I reckon

for the Burmese tofu

2 cups gram flour

2 cups water

1 tsp turmeric

1 veggie stock cube

good grind of meat seasoning

(something like a mix of sea salt, brown sugar,

roasted garlic, chilli, paprika flakes,

black peppercorns, yellow mustard seeds,

coriander leaves...etc

The sort of thing you'd put on a meat rub)

to cook

2 more cups of water

for the batter

9 tbsp cornflour

3 tbsp gram flour

salt

meat seasoning

water

1. Mix all dry Burmese tofu ingredients together throughly, and then whisk into 2 cups of water until a smooth batter forms.
2. Bring another 2 cups of water to the boil in a large saucepan. Once boiling, carefully pour in the batter mix whilst continually stirring. Stir until batter is rather thick. I suggest using a spatular, it gets to be quite clingy and hard to push through.
3. Pour the thickened mix onto a lined tray and let col to room temperature. Do not use your little finger to help the batter off the spatular. This shit burns and an angry pinky will make the rest of your life hard for longer than you feel is necessary. Pretend it's hot sugar. Don't touch it.
4. Refrigerate for an hour or so.
5. Mix all of your batter ingredients together slowly adding water until you get a thickish, smooth batter. To be fair, you could make any sort of batter you like.
6. Tear up your cooled Burmese tofu into bitesized pieces, dip in the batter and fry in a cm or so of hot oil until golden.
7. Eat it.
8. Eat more of it.
9. Deliberately put some in a container so your mum gets to try it before you scoff the lot.