Served on their own, these chickpea fritters are a wonderful treat to nibble on with wine or cocktails before a meal or as a snack.
These Sicilian chickpea fritters, known as panelle in Italian, are often associated with Sicily’s capital city Palermo, where you can buy them sandwiched inside a sesame seed bun at street-side snack bars. But if you can’t get to Palermo any time soon, no worries. Panelle are pretty easy to make at home. You prepare a cooked batter very much like polenta only much faster. You spread out the batter very thin on a flat surface and allow it to cool and firm up, before cutting it into little rectangles or squares and deep frying them until golden brown.
Panelle might bring to mind Liguria’s farinata, a baked flatbread also made with a chickpea batter. But while both have a similarly delicious, mildly nutty flavor, if you ask me, the crispiness you get by frying them gives panelle a definite leg up. They’re a bit like potato chips, only thicker and tastier.
Served on their own, panelle are a wonderful treat to nibble on with wine or cocktails before a meal or as a snack. But be careful not to spoil your appetite… These little fellas are really addictive!
Makes about 25 panelle
Optional ingredients:
Pour the water into a large saucepan with a generous pinch of salt. Whisk in the flour vigorously until it is well incorporated, to form a rather thin batter.
Turn on the heat and bring the batter to a simmer, whisking all the while to prevent lumping. As soon as it comes up to temperature, it will thicken very quickly. Once it is quite dense, take it off the heat. Mix in the minced parsley and ground black pepper if using.
While it is still hot, transfer the cooked batter to a flat, non-pourous surface (a cookie sheet works well) which you have greased well with olive oil. Using a flat spatula you’ve moistened with water, spread the batter out very thin, ideally about 3mm (1/8 in) if you can manage it. Let the batter cool completely; it will firm up as it cools. Cut into small squares or rectangles about 5cm (2 in) and gingerly lift the pieces off the surface with the spatula.
Deep fry the pieces in hot (190C/375F) oil until they are golden brown, working in batches if need be to avoid crowding. They should puff up a bit as they fry. Drain them on paper towels as they are done.
Serve your panelle right away, sprinkled with salt. If you like, have some lemon wedges on the side for those who like their panelle sprinkled with some lemon juice.
In Palermo, panelle are often sold as street food, wedged in a sesame seed bun. My experience with panelle was in restaurants in western Sicily, served, sans bun, as an antipasto. And while parsley and pepper show up in many recipes, the ones I tried were plain—but still delicious!
Chickpea flour, also known as garbanzo bean flour, is available at better supermarkets these days. (In the US, Whole Foods carries it.) And if you can’t find it in your local stores, it is also available online.
An alternative technique for forming your panelle is to pour the cooked batter into a rectangular mold (the kind you might use for sandwich bread) to cool. You then thinly slice the solidified batter with a moistened thin-bladed knife before deep frying. This method avoids the fuss of spreading out the panelle batter onto a flat surface, and allows you to get the panelle as thin as you like. But it does take rather longer for the batter to cool, about 30-45 minutes.
It’s always a good idea to avoid crowding the pan whenever you’re frying, but it’s especially important with panelle. Besides turning out greasy, the little squares or rectangles won’t puff up as they should. So make sure they have plenty of room to swim around in the oil.
You can make panelle ahead up to the point of frying. But they really need to be fried at the last moment and eaten right away to be at their best. Cold panelle are edible, but just barely. They tend to get rubbery and taste rather ‘flat’. Reheated panelle are very much second-best, but if you give them a quick dip in hot oil rather than, say, warming them in a microwave, they can be acceptable. And if you have an oven with an “air fry” or convection function, that might also work.
You can also make panelle in the oven if you’re not keen on deep frying. You put the greased baking sheet on which you have spread the chickpea batter, brushed on top with olive oil, in a hot oven with the broiler pre-heated to 200C/400F. Let the top get nice and golden brown, then take it out of the oven and cut it into squares or rectangles. Not quite as good as fried, if you ask me, but quite good nonetheless.
You may have noticed the charming ceramic figurine in the corner of this week’s photo. In Sicily, they call it la testa del Moro, or the Moor’s head. We all received one of these as a favor at the wedding I mentioned in the last post. And there’s quite the story behind them!
You see, Sicily was once ruled by the Moors. In those days a Moorish prince arrived in Palermo and seduced a beautiful young local maiden. They fell in love, and for a while it seemed they would live happily ever after. But suddenly the young prince disappeared. The maiden found out that he had returned to his homeland. She followed him there, only to find that he was already married with kids. One night while he was sleeping, she got her revenge: She cut off his head and secreted it back to Palermo to use as a vase for planting basil—the plant of love and passion—which she proudly displayed on her balcony.
Quite a story to bring to mind at a wedding! I guess it’s a good way to remind the groom to stay faithful..
Gene Roefaro
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