Chickpea Magic Trick

Most avid home cooks thirst for complexity and aspiration. That's part of the DNA strand, I suppose. But not me. I appreciate nothing more than a lazy shortcut.

Here, for example, is my recipe for Five Minute Tacos, posted to Chowhound in 2015 (thanks to the Internet Archive).

And just last week, I noted, here, my Chickpea Magic Trick:

If you open, drain, and rinse a can of chickpeas and toss them into an air fryer for 15 minute, you get a delightfully crunchy snack (optional pre-spray with some olive oil and/or scattering of salt and/or paprika and/or cumin), offering fiber while satisfying copious crunchy cravings.

I've been iterating and iterating, and finally struck upon magic. Drain and rinse, then spray or drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, mix energetically, then add soy sauce. Ideally, aged soy sauce, if you can find some (if it's less than $10/bottle, it's fake). But even regular soy sauce works well. Just don't overdo it. Then mix.

Note: the powder is chickpea dust (one or two usually explode violently - you can hear the pop from a block away), not salt.

Next thing I'll try adding to the soy sauce and olive oil is a bit of cayenne pepper (I'd probably add tabasco or piri piri if I wanted to call attention to the chili heat). And there might still be room for one additional agent of je ne sais quoi. But even as-is, it's pretty damned delicious for a recipe that takes less than one minute of effort (a solid 8 on my surprisingly non-ditzy scale for rating foods and other things from one to ten).

I tried using smoked paprika (before trying soy sauce), and it didn't do much, but I'm wondering if it might work better with the soy and cayenne. Will report back.