Spicy Indian Chickpeas Salad

This spicy Indian chickpea salad is all you need to make your meal nourishing and flavorful. This chickpea salad with cucumber, tomatoes, and Indian spices is easy to make, full of flavors, and makes your meal refreshing.

This vegan and gluten-free salad is a great side dish for lunch and dinner.

I love bean salads so much as they are nutritious, filling, and easy to make. This chickpea salad is ideal if you want to have your dinner light. Also, this salad will be a great side dish for pasta, burger, or bread. You can even have this with cooked quinoa or cooked millet.

Main Ingredients for Indian Chickpea Salad

Chickpeas: I love to cook my chickpeas from scratch at home. And Instant Pot makes that job easy and hands-free. Cooking chickpeas in Instant Pot is easy with my detailed guide. You can use canned chickpeas also to make this salad. Drain and rinse the canned chickpeas to make this salad.

Veggies: I used chopped cucumber, tomato, and onion to make this simple salad. This salad is very customizable, and you can use any veggies of your choice. Boiled, steamed, or baked broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, potatoes, and sweet potatoes go well in this recipe. You can even use bell peppers, kale, carrots, corn, and cabbage. I usually use veggies according to the season and availability.

Spices: As chickpeas go very well with Indian spices, I used Indian spices to make this chickpea salad. I used finely chopped green chili or jalapeno, which will be spicy. To make it less spicy, omit green chili and use red chili flakes or ground black pepper. Ground cumin, chaat masala, and garam masala powder are optional spices that give Indian flavor to this salad.

Salad dressing:  This recipe uses simple salad dressing with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.

Herbs: I used finely chopped fresh cilantro leaves, which go well with Indian spices. Mint leaves also go well in this recipe. You can use other fresh herbs like dill leaves, parsley, and basil.

Nuts & seeds: Nuts and seeds are optional, but they add a nice crunch to the salad. I used walnuts and black sesame seeds to make the salad colorful. Pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and almonds taste good in this salad. You can even use raisins to add a sweet flavor to this salad.

Detailed Steps to Make Indian Chickpea Salad

Cook the Chickpeas

• Soak the chickpeas for 8 hours or overnight. 
• Discard the water from soaked chickpeas and wash them a couple of times. 
• Add soaked and rinsed chickpeas, water and salt to the Instant pot inner pot.

• Close the Instant pot with its lid and seal the vent.
• Start the Instant pot using manual or pressure cook mode and cook them for 10 minutes on HIGH pressure.
• Once the Instant pot finishes cooking, wait for 10 minutes and do a manual pressure release.
• Strain the chickpeas and keep them aside. And reserve the water. You can use this water in soups and curries.

Chop the veggies

• Chop cucumber, tomatoes, and onions. I chopped them finely, but you can even slice them.

• If using other veggies that have to be cooked before, like potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, cook them and keep them aside.

Make the chickpea salad

• Take a mixing bowl and add cooked chickpeas.

• To this bowl, add chopped veggies - cucumber, tomatoes, red onion. Also, add finely chopped green chili, cilantro leaves, lemon juice, olive oil, sesame seeds, chopped walnuts, salt, and spices (ground cumin, chaat masala, garam masala powder)

• Mix everything well, and the delicious and spicy Indian chickpeas salad is ready to serve.

Recipe Notes

• Spice powders - cumin powder, garam masala, and chaat masala are optional, but they give the Indian taste to the salad.
• You can find these Indian spices in online stores or Indian supermarkets easily.
• Instead of chaat masala, you can use dried mango powder.
• Don't like chickpeas? You can make this spicy salad with other beans like kidney beans, black-eyed peas, and pinto beans.
• To convert this salad as Indian street food, add boiled potatoes to this salad and skip cucumber. Flavorful Indian-style chana salad will please all your guests at a party or gettogether.
• If you want to cook dried chickpeas at home, I have a detailed post on Instant pot chickpeas to help you cook soaked or dried chickpeas.

Serving suggestions

Not only this salad goes well with any Indian dishes, but you can also serve this with pasta, quinoa, millet.

While making salad in step 3, slightly mash the chickpeas, and your mashed chickpeas salad is ready. You can use this mashed chickpeas salad as a taco, tortilla, sandwich filling. And this will taste good even if it is cold, making an ideal lunch box item.

I sometimes have this alone for a light and hearty dinner.

Storage

You can store this salad in the refrigerator for 1 or 2 days. But skip the onions as they might not taste good.

I do not recommend freezing the salad. Instead, freeze the cooked chickpeas and make this salad when needed.

As you are here, you will love my other Instant pot recipes

Instant pot black-eyed peas salad

Instant pot chickpeas masala

Instant pot vegetable curry

If you are looking for some chickpeas recipes, do try these out!

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