[food] Ottolenghi's confit tandoori chickpeas

[kaberett]

These used to be available as part of the Ottolenghi Ready range, which is where we first encountered them, but no longer seem to exist (at least as far as the online shop is concerned), alas. We liked them enough that I kept the packaging for the sake of the ingredients list; versions of a similar recipe had appeared in various online venues including the Graun, but none of them were Quite Right. Latterly, a recipe has gone up on the main website, and that too is not quite the Ottolenghi Ready version (even leaving aside the part where every single time I've tried following the recipe as written the dish has ended up with a small lake of delicious but not actually What I Want For Dinner oil).

I have spent a bunch of time experimenting with quantities and so on and so forth, and I have finally got a version of this that I am Satisfied With.

Ingredients
2 tins of chickpeas, drained (or equivalent)
1 bulb of garlic, cloves peeled and left whole
30g fresh ginger, peeled and julienned
400g cherry tomatoes, as fancy as you like
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tsp salt
~25 curry leaves
peel (not pith!) from half a lemon (up to a whole lemon), in strips or zested, as you prefer
100ml olive oil
1 tin chopped tomatoes

Notes

The ingredients list from the packaging includes paprika. We've concluded we don't like it, but if you add significant amounts of ground spice you probably want to use more oil.

We prefer More Tomatoes, hence the tinned tomatoes, but they must not be added until the end of cooking or the oil floats on top of them and the chickpeas cook primarily in the tomato instead of the oil, which means you don't get the chickpea confit, and the texture is overall less good and there is Even More Oil that hasn't been absorbed.

Method

Heat oven to 150°C fan.

Place all of the ingredients except the tinned tomatoes into an ovenproof pan, with lid. Stir to distribute everything. Cover with lid.

Put pan in oven for ~90 minutes total. After ~30 minutes, give everything a quick stir. After another ~30 minutes (i.e. 60 minutes total), add the tinned tomato and stir. Return to oven for another ~30 minutes.

Excellent served with yoghurt and flatbread or rice or probably couscous.

Comments

[starlady]

Hmm, you're using even less olive oil than I am. Last time I made it I used about 160ml and I thought that was approaching a better amount--I was contemplating reducing it further next time as an experiment. The curry leaves seem like a particularly good idea too.

[kaberett]

The curry leaves and lemon were both in the Ottolenghi Ready iteration and we definitely thought they were missing from the published recipes! The packaging indicates that the curry leaves were actually separately fried with a little salt, and presumably then added toward the end of cooking, but I just chuck them in with everything else.