Spanish Garbanzos con espinacas - Chickpeas with Spinach from Seville
One of Andalusia's oldest tapas, and originally a Lenten dish: chickpeas, spinach, cumin and a handful of bread as the thickener. Moorish heritage, still on every bar menu in Seville.
Why this dish is good for you
Over seven milligrams of iron a portion - more than a beef steak - from chickpeas and spinach together. The red wine vinegar is functional here: like vitamin C, acid improves the uptake of plant iron, much of which would otherwise go unused.
Ingredients
- Chickpeas(weighed dry, soaked overnight)250 g
- Spinach(fresh, washed - it collapses to a tenth of its volume)500 g
- Olive oil35 g
- Wholemeal bread(stale, cubed, fried golden in the oil)30 g
- Red wine vinegar20 g
- Garlic(four to five cloves)18 g
- Smoked paprika5 g
- Cumin(whole seeds, crushed in a mortar)4 g
- Salt3 g
Method
- 1
Soak the chickpeas overnight, drain and simmer in fresh unsalted water for 70 to 90 minutes until soft. Keep the cooking water.
- 2
Fry the bread cubes and garlic golden in the olive oil, lift them out and work both with cumin, paprika and vinegar to a coarse paste in a mortar or blender.
- 3
Add the spinach to the same pan in batches, stirring only until it wilts.
- 4
Add the chickpeas with a ladle of their cooking water.
- 5
Stir in the paste and simmer for five minutes until the sauce thickens. Season with salt only now.
- 6
Serve warm or lukewarm - in Seville it comes to the table in small earthenware dishes.
🍞 Brot als Bindemittel
The toasted bread paste is called majado in Spanish and thickens the sauce without roux or cream. The same technique sits behind almost every old sauce of southern Spain - a kitchen that threw nothing away made its thickener out of yesterday's loaf.
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