Chickpea Butter Is a Protein-Packed Alternative to Traditional Peanut Butter

Chickpeas might be one of the most versatile ingredients in the entire world. You can toss them on salads and use them in stews, but you can also make them into pasta and turn them into puffy, Cheetos-esque snack foods. And now chickpeas can also make a sweet, toasty, protein-packed alternative to peanut butter.

As Extra Crispy’s Rebecca Firkser points out, most peanut butter alternatives are made with seeds or different kinds of nuts, and while all those nut butters are pretty great in their own right, it’s worth noting that peanut butter is not technically a nut butter at all. As we all learned from Saturday Night Live in the ’90s, “the peanut is neither a pea nor a nut.” It’s a legume, and so are chickpeas.

The Amazing Chickpea‘s creamy chickpea butter is designed to be sticky and spreadable like peanut butter, with the same sweet, salty, protein-rich flavor profile. It’s made of dry-roasted chickpeas, sunflower seeds, olive oil, and cane sugar, and basically you can do anything with it that you’d do with ordinary peanut butter. You can use it for toast, sandwiches, or cookies. Eating it straight with a spoon is also an option.

“So if you think about it, a spread made from chickpeas (also legumes) is a logical extension,” Amazing Chickpea CEO Sunil Kumar told FoodNavigator USA.

Chickpea butter is a pretty cool option for a lot of people. My kid loves peanut butter, but goes to a nut-free school. Chickpea butter is a useful alternative. And Kumar says a lot of people who could eat as much peanut butter as they want have been buying the chickpea butter too, just because chickpeas are awesome.

Chickpea butter has its own flavor, which is similar to oven-roasted chickpeas, which are a seriously irresistible snack in their own right. It doesn’t taste exactly like peanut butter, but it’s still pretty great in the middle of a stick of celery, preferably with raisins on top of it.

Chickpea butter comes in both creamy and crunchy varieties, like regular peanut butter, and you can buy it on Amazon, or you can even try making your own with this recipe for honey roasted chickpea butter.

Would you ever try chickpea butter?