Long story short my mixture (from canned chickpeas) was too soupy and my carefully formed balls disintegrated in the frying oil. Quel dommage!!
Seriously! How good do those look?!! Haha I knew this post was going to have a lot of exclamation points in it!
The trick, I've discovered, is to use dried chickpeas and not to cook them.
So...
Put 1 cup of dried chickpeas in a bowl full of cold water and let them soak overnight.
A few hours before you want to eat dinner, assemble your felafel balls and refrigerate them. The recipe I was using says this helps keep them together in the hot oil.
In a food processor add:
drained chickpeas
1/2 cup fresh chopped parsley
1 small onion
4 ish cloves of garlic
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cummin
Whuge everything together until combined and then add 2-4 tablespoons of flour. The flour helps dry the mixture out so it depends on humidity etc for the amount. You should be able to form the mixture into a ball in your hand without it seriously sticking.
Form into walnut sized balls and refrigerate.
When you're ready to eat them, heat 1 1/2-2 inches of oil in a frying pan at medium high heat.
Check to see if the oil is hot enough by spattering a couple TINY droplets of water into the pan. If they crackle and spit then the oils hot enough. I usually just wet a few of my fingers under the tap and kind of flick them at the surface of the oil. Feel free to flick water at your friend at this point as well.
I then put the felafel balls into the frying oil and fried them for about 5 minutes on one side and then probably 3 minutes on the other. I have metal tongs that I used to turn them and they came out a beautiful golden brown!!
We ate them in whole wheat petas with fresh tomato, grated carrot, lettuce, hummus and tatziki. How does one make Tatziki you might ask? Simple.
Grate half a cucumber into a sieve, over a bowl and salt it. Leave the cucumber to drain for a couple hours to get some of the water out.
You can skip this step and just mix it all together but if you keep the tatziki overnight the water you didn't drain out separates from the yogurt and whole thing gets kind of weird. And not good weird.
Mix the drained cucumber with garlic, salt, pepper, the juice of one half lemon, fresh dill or parsley and a little over half a cup of plain yogurt. Slather generously on Felafel.
My plan is to make up the rest of the felafel mixture tonight and freeze half of them raw and the other half fried and see which way works better. I'm kind of hoping that the ones I fry will be initially soggy when defrosted but after popping them in the oven they'll crisp up again. I'll let you know how it all turns out. I promise.
