ORGANIC GARBANZO BEANS
Aka: Chickpea
A garbanzo is unlike other legumes in two ways. First, while beans and lentils are smooth surfaced, a garbanzo is not; it's wrinkled, roundish, but compressed and flattened at the sides with a projecting nascent radicle that looks like a chick's beak. Second, while most legumes share a pod with half a dozen or so other seeds, a garbanzo has only one mature pea per pod. Garbanzos were one of our first cultivated crops and today they are a popular legume throughout the temperate world. The most common garbanzo in the United States is tannish in color, although there are red, white, brown, and black varieties available.

Health Benefits: The garbanzo is sweet in flavor and supports the spleen-pancreas, stomach, and heart. Indeed, it is shaped something like a heart, with two hemispheres, rounded at the top, and pointed at the bottom. Furthermore, its pod envelopes each bean much like a pericardium. The organic garbanzo bean provides more vitamin C, nearly double the usual amount of iron, and (soy excepted) three times more fat than most legumes.

Use: If the only way you know garbanzo beans is from a salad bar, then you're eating canned garbanzos and missing a treat. Simmered until tender, with garlic and some toasted cumin seed, garbanzos are one of the creamiest and tastiest of beans. Add them whole or mashed to soups, croquettes, vegetable dishes, or enjoy them plain as a side dish. They are the basis for the popular Mid-eastern dishes hummus and falafel. Cooked and then seasoned and roasted, they make a tasty nutlike snack food.

from Rebecca Wood's The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia

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