Greek Chickpeas with Spinach (Revithia me Spanaki)

Chickpeas and greens is one of the oldest combinations in Greek cooking and it survives because it does something no other fasting dish quite manages: a bowl that is genuinely filling, genuinely cheap, and bright enough with lemon and dill that nobody thinks of it as penance.

The chickpeas are the whole job. Dried, soaked overnight, and cooked slowly until they are creamy right through rather than merely soft, which takes over an hour and cannot be shortened without losing the texture that makes the dish.

Everything else happens in the last ten minutes. A large bag of spinach goes in and collapses to almost nothing, then dill, then a lot of lemon juice and a final pour of raw olive oil off the heat. That last oil is not optional: it is the finish, and in Greek kitchens it is measured with a heavy hand.

Key preparation steps

1. Soak dried chickpeas overnight with bicarbonate of soda.
2. Simmer slowly with onion and olive oil until creamy.
3. Crush some of the chickpeas to thicken the liquid.
4. Wilt in spinach, then finish with dill, lemon and raw oil.

Do I have to use dried chickpeas?

For the proper version, yes. Dried chickpeas cooked from scratch release starch into their own cooking liquid, and that starch is what gives the dish its creamy body. Tinned chickpeas arrive already cooked and give you a thin, watery result.

If tins are the only option, use three 400 g tins, drain and rinse them, and simmer them in 700 ml of vegetable stock for twenty minutes, crushing more of them than usual against the pot to make up for the missing starch.

Why add bicarbonate of soda to the soak?

It softens the skins and helps the chickpeas cook evenly, which matters a great deal if your water is hard or the chickpeas have been in the cupboard a while. A quarter teaspoon in the soaking water is enough.

Rinse them properly afterwards, since any bicarbonate carried into the pot gives a faint soapy taste. Some Greek cooks also rub the soaked chickpeas between their palms to loosen the skins and float them off, which gives a silkier finished pot.

How do I thicken it without flour?

Crush the chickpeas themselves. Take a wooden spoon to about a fifth of them against the side of the pot in the last twenty minutes and they will dissolve into the liquid and thicken it exactly the way it should be thickened.

The alternative is to lift out a ladleful, blend it and stir it back in, which gives a smoother result. What you should not do is add flour or cornflour, which flattens the flavour and gives a slightly gluey texture that is easy to detect.

When do the spinach and lemon go in?

Right at the end. Spinach needs three or four minutes at most and it will collapse to about a tenth of its raw volume, so add far more than looks sensible.

Lemon juice goes in off the heat, along with the dill and the last of the raw olive oil. Acid added early dulls as it cooks and can also toughen the skins of pulses, so squeezing it in at the very end is both better tasting and better technique.

What matters in this dish