The Gulf and Arabia · Volume 07, The Pit, the Port and the Pilgrim’s Table
Bileela
Jeddah (Al-Balad district)
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Hands on 1 hour 30 · Waiting 8 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Simply dressed chickpeas sold hot from stalls in Jeddah's historic Al-Balad district, part of the same old street-food economy that has fed the port city's dockworkers, traders and pilgrims passing through for generations; this is genuinely, specifically Jeddawi in a way sayadieh, discussed elsewhere in this chapter, is not.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour 30 minutes, plus overnight soaking.
Ingredients
- 300g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
- a pinch bicarbonate of soda
- a generous pour samn or olive oil
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- to taste salt
- 1 lemon, squeezed
- 1 tbsp, optional tahini, optional
- a handful, optional parsley and chilli, chopped, optional
Method
- Simmer the soaked dried chickpeas with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, to soften the skins faster, until fully tender, 60 to 90 minutes depending on their age.
- Drain and dress simply: a generous pour of samn or olive oil, a scattering of ground cumin, salt, and a squeeze of lemon, sometimes with a spoon of tahini or a scattering of chopped parsley and chilli alongside.
What a modern chef changes
Sous vide chickpeas and a strained cumin oil
Method
- Cook the chickpeas sous vide with the bicarbonate and their soaking liquid at 90°C for several hours rather than simmering them, giving an unusually even, skin-intact tenderness that stovetop cooking, with its risk of blowing the skins before the centre softens, rarely achieves.
- Brown the samn until it smells distinctly nutty before dressing the chickpeas in it.
- Finish with a cumin oil made by warming whole cumin seeds gently in the same fat until fragrant, then straining, rather than dusting ground cumin over the top, carrying the same aromatic further and more evenly through the dish.