These easy chickpea salad sandwiches are made with smoky avocado dressing, crunchy cucumbers and red bell peppers, all piled between crusty bread slices. Perfect for a healthy lunch or light dinner!
These chickpea sandwiches are special. A French chef named Jean-Pierre taught me to make them. Sort of.
I had a chickpea sandwich for lunch at a pub a while back. At the time I wasn't too enthused about the idea of a chickpea sandwich. It sounded kind of boring to me, but it was the only thing on the menu that I could eat.
I guess I'm never that enthused about any option that's the only option. It turned out to be surprisingly tasty, and since then a bunch of chickpea sandwiches online have caught my attention. I wanted to create my own version but was at a bit of a loss as to what I could do differently. That's where Jean-Pierre comes in.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a cooking class with my mom and brother. This was a birthday gift from my brother and me to my mom. It was one of those events where you cook a three course meal under the instruction of a pro, and then you get to eat it.
I'm not going to name names or anything, but the person who made the reservation for us promised he would inform the cooking school folks about my dietary restrictions and that it wouldn't be a problem. Instead we arrived to a menu including a chicken laden salad and salmon-stuffed puff pastry. (Enter sad trombone sound effect.)
The instructor and his team were awesome about accommodating though, and able to pull together meatless variations of all of my courses.
The first one was something they called a tower salad. We stuffed all of our ingredients into a big cylinder to mold it into a tower. That salad was totally vegan and it was freaking delicious! It was also enormous. I could have gone home happy after that, and was pretty close to telling Jean-Pierre not to worry about modifying the other courses.
The binder in the tower salad contained, among other things, avocado whipped with lemon juice and liquid smoke. It was so good. I had to cop his logic for this sandwich. The sandwich absolutely lived up to its salad predecessor, and is perfect when you're in need of a healthy vegan lunch!
Tips for Making Awesome Chickpea Salad Sandwiches
- Look for liquid smoke near the barbecue sauces at your supermarket.
- The trick to selecting a ripe avocado: pull out the stem. If it's ripe, it will be green underneath.
- To keep this recipe gluten-free, use your favorite gluten-free sandwich bread.
- If your avocado is very fresh, you can get away with making this about a half day in advance. Much more than that, and your avocado will probably start to turn brown.
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Smoky Smashed Chickpea Salad Sandwiches
These easy chickpea salad sandwiches are made with smoky avocado dressing, crunchy cucumbers and red bell peppers, all piled between crusty bread slices. Perfect for a healthy lunch or light dinner!
Ingredients
- 1 very ripe avocado, mashed well
- 2 tbsp. lemon juice, about 1 lemon
- 2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
- 1 tsp. liquid smoke
- ½ tsp. salt, or to taste
- 1 ¾ cups cooked or 1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
- ½ cucumber, seeded and diced
- ½ red bell pepper, diced
- 2 scallions, chopped
- 2 tbsp. fresh cilantro, chopped
- 8 slices sandwich bread
- A few handfuls of arugula or lettuce
Instructions
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Place the avocado and lemon into medium mixing bowl. I like to it beat with a whisk or fork to get avocado as smooth as possible, but you can skip that if you're into chunky.
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Add the vinegar, smoke and salt. Mix well. Taste-test and adjust the seasonings as needed.
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Add the chickpeas and roughly mash them. I like to leave about half of them in-tact, but mash up as much as you like.
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Add the cucumber, pepper, scallions and cilantro. Mix to blend everything.
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Distribute mixture among three or four sandwiches, topping each with arugula or lettuce.
Delish! I did cut down the liquid smoke to 1/4 tsp to get a very subtle smokiness. Loved how it turned out and love that it uses avocado instead of mayo.
Thank you! I was pretty excited to discover that avocado worked as a mayo substitute :) So glad you enjoyed this. Thank you so much for sharing your results!!
I've just started a new job as school assistant, and as I'll have to bring my own lunch (of course), your back-to-school newsletter today was oh so timely! This caught my eye immediately in the list, and I'm looking forward to throwing a batch of chickpeas together for this week's lunches!
Oh perfect!! I just decided to start sending out those weekly newsletters - I'm so glad it was helpful! Thanks Stefani - I hope you enjoy this!
P.S. I just noticed that in the ingredient list the cilantro seems to have disappeared. It is in the description, though.