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How to Dehydrate Chickpeas & Hummus
April 04, 2025
Hello Chef,

For last month’s Trail Bytes, I used up my stash of dehydrated peach salsa for one of our hikes. We like it better than store-bought salsa, so I’ll be making another batch soon.

On a recent trip to the store, I picked up a tub of hummus to fill in for that evening’s tortilla-chip-dipping. Not bad… but that sparked the idea for making and dehydrating homemade hummus.

Dehydrating Hummus

You can make dehydrated hummus the quick and easy way with canned chickpeas, but I went with dry chickpeas, which I soaked overnight and cooked before blending with tahini and other ingredients. The flavor was wonderful, and once powdered, the hummus rehydrated instantly with hot or cold water.

I made cold-soak hummus-veggie tortilla wraps with it, and a more substantial cooked version with rice, ground beef, and vegetables.

Dehydrating Chickpeas

I also dehydrated canned and home-cooked chickpeas, and used them in recipes like Chickpea Eggplant Parmesan. Chickpeas are a good substitute for dehydrated ground chicken in meals, because they match the color and retain some chewiness.

Lastly, I ground dehydrated chickpeas into powder and added it to ground beef and chicken. As you know, working a ½-cup of starch into a pound of ground meat before cooking and drying it improves rehydration.

The ground meat infused with ground chickpeas rehydrated to perfect chewiness. Now we have three good starches you can use for conditioning ground meat:

  • Ground Chickpeas
  • Ground Breadcrumbs
  • Ground Oats

You’ll find the recipes and instructions on the new page:

Dehydrating Chickpeas & Hummus

Where’s the Beef?

I did some reorganizing on the website this month to make it easier to find dehydrated beef recipes shared by readers, as well as several of my own. The invitation is always open if you want to share a recipe.

Explore the new page here:

Dehydrated Beef Recipes

Spring has finally arrived in Pfäffikon, but we’re not packing up our winter coats just yet. We plan to explore some new trails this month, so see you in May for an update. Always love hearing from you. How’s it going with your meal preparations? What trips are you planning?

Freundliche Grüsse,

Chef Glenn & Dominique

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