Up until recently I don’t think I’d ever tried a roasted chickpea. At the very least I don’t think I’d had one on it’s own. It’s completely possible that I tried one in a snack mix with various dried beans, as I’ve sampled a few of those in my life, but it was only recently that I tried the roasted chickpeas on their own. The first time I tried roasted chickpeas was a small sample package of them with a salted lime flavour. My one comment about them at the time was that I thought they might have been stale. Then, a few weeks later I cracked open this package of dark chocolate covered chickpeas and ones again my first thought was that maybe these are a little bit stale.

The best way to describe the flavour is to say that it’s similar to a slightly past its prime peanut. Or if you want to get more specific, it tastes like Play Dough tastes (not like it smells). It’s a slightly stale flavour that I don’t totally hate, but I don’t totally love either. Now it could be that I’m totally off base and I just happened to have had two bags of stale chickpeas, weirder things have happened in my life. While I’m happy to give chickpeas a try again, I don’t think I’ll be buying bags of them to munch on in the near future.

The good news is that these are saved greatly by the dark chocolate. The dark chocolate does a wonderful job of smoothing out, or even covering up the stale flavour, and after the second or third handful it’s almost completely dark chocolate with no stale flavour. The chickpeas do provide a nice crunch to these, something a little more crunchy than a peanut, but not too big in size.

I could be completely wrong about my assessment of roasted chickpeas, and it could just be bad luck on my side. I have had other snacks from Three Farmers in the past, and I’ve never had the problem of stale treats from them ever. So I’m wondering if chickpeas might just not be for me. If that’s the case, I’m wondering if the fine folks at Three Farmers (who make some of the best dried pulse and bean treats in the world) might consider making dark chocolate lentils. I’m a huge fan of their salt and vinegar lentils, and if they could cover them in chocolate as well as they covered these, I think there might be a big hit on their hands.