Elevate Basic Poached Eggs With The Ever-Versatile Chickpea

You would be hard-pressed to find a savory dish that doesn't pair well with a poached egg on top. Chickpeas, also known as garbanzo beans, are no exception. Whether roasted, sautéed, simmered, fried, blended, or served straight from the can, the creamy, nutty flavor of the ever-versatile legume is particularly tasty when met with the rich, runny yolk of a poached egg. Serve your take on the hearty meal for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or all of the above.

We're certainly not the first to praise the dish. There are myriad versions of the much-ballyhooed pairing on the internet, and we have no doubt that many more have sprung from the kitchens of resourceful home cooks. By the same token, you don't need a recipe to plate up the delicious combination of poached eggs and chickpeas, but it's always helpful to use some tried-and-true interpretations of a dish as a starting point. On that note, here are some ideas to get your culinary juices flowing.

If the best dishes are the ones that yield deep flavor with minimal effort, then chickpeas with poached eggs deserve top billing. Take our recipe for slow-cooked chickpeas on toast. The end result might taste like something you labored over for hours, but the process is super hands-off. After frying soaked and boiled (or canned) chickpeas in a paste of olive oil, onion, garlic, cayenne, paprika, and other spices, they're simmered in water for four hours until their flavor has developed and the liquid has transformed into a luxurious sauce. We would eat this dish at any time of day, but when it's served over grilled sourdough and topped with a poached egg, it begs to be called brunch.

If you don't have that kind of time, there are plenty more options. You can, of course, plop a poached egg on top of chickpeas however you like them. Try them fried in olive oil with salt and pepper or roasted on a sheet pan with smashed garlic cloves. But when a runny yolk is involved, a brothy and/or saucy bowl of chickpeas might be your best bet. 

Indeed, cuisines around the world boast their own versions of chickpea and egg stew, including Tunisia, where comforting lablabi is often served with a soft egg. Meanwhile, in Spain, a fragrant stew called Garbanzos con Espinacas pairs chickpeas with spinach and ginger. 

People have been serving chickpeas with eggs long before the creation of the internet or electricity, for that matter. Proof lies in a 14th-century Tuscan cookbook called "Anonimo Toscano," which, according to Historical Italian Cooking, includes 10 recipes for chickpeas divvied up by category — "fat days," "lean days," food for the sick, and food to be eaten only on Saturdays. The latter category includes just two recipes, both of which call for, you guessed it, eggs. If Italians have been pairing the two ingredients since the Middle Ages, you know it's good. 

The weekend stew calls for chickpeas, farmer's cheese, black pepper, and saffron. As for the egg, its raw yolk gets added to the pot at the very end of the cooking process. It's dropped in gently and simmered just long enough to poach. It goes without saying that, in these modern times, you can eat this stew any day of the week.