Panelle (Sicilian Chickpea Fritters)

Panelle are made from chickpea flour, water, salt and parsley, and nothing else. The batter is whisked cold, then cooked and stirred for twenty to thirty minutes until it pulls away from the pan like polenta. It is spread two or three millimetres thick on an oiled surface, left to set, cut into rectangles or triangles, and fried until it puffs.

The result is crisp and blistered outside, soft and almost creamy inside, with the sweet earthy flavour of chickpeas. There is no gluten, no egg and no dairy anywhere in them, which makes panelle one of the very few Italian street foods that are naturally vegan and gluten free, though the bread they are served in is not.

They belong to a Mediterranean family that includes Ligurian farinata, Genoese panissa, and the socca and panisses of Nice and Marseille. Panisse in particular is essentially the same preparation.

Mildly sweet, nutty and earthy, in the way chickpeas are, with the fried edge adding a savoury crunch. There is nothing rich about them, no cheese and no meat and no egg, so the pleasure is all texture and the contrast between the shattering outside and the soft centre.

Hot from the oil with lemon squeezed over, they taste bright and clean rather than heavy. Cold, they turn dense and slightly chalky, which is why nobody in Palermo sells them cold.

In the sandwich, the soft sesame roll does something specific: it absorbs the oil and turns the fritters into a proper meal. The whole thing tastes like fried bread crossed with hummus, in the best possible sense.

Eat them within a minute or two of leaving the oil. This is not fussiness: panelle go from crisp to leathery in about ten minutes, which is why Palermo fries them in waves rather than in advance.

The classic way is in a soft sesame roll: split it, load in four or five hot fritters, squeeze lemon over them, close it, eat standing up. No sauce, no salad, no mayonnaise. Add potato croquettes and you have ordered the standard Palermo lunch, pane e panelle e cazzilli.

At home, serve them as a starter with lemon wedges and black pepper, or alongside an orange and fennel salad. Grated ricotta salata over the top is a good Sicilian addition.

The batter can be made a day ahead: spread it, chill it, cut it, and fry to order. That single step turns panelle from a project into a practical thing to serve at a table.

Chickpea flour carries more fat than wheat flour and behaves accordingly. Sealed, it keeps to the date on the pack, which is the miller's reference; once open, transfer it to an airtight jar in a cool dark cupboard, or keep it in the fridge or freezer if the bag is large, because the oil in it oxidises and the smell shifts from beany toward bitter and faintly soapy. Warmth above the stove is what speeds that up.

The cooked paste is the useful thing to store. Spread and cooled, the slab keeps wrapped in the fridge at 0 to 4 C for two or three days, firming as it goes and drying at the exposed edges, which is why it is cut just before frying. Cut squares freeze well at minus 18 C, layered between sheets of paper so they separate, for two to three months, and go into the oil straight from frozen. Fried panelle are a matter of minutes: steam works back into the crust and they go soft and leathery within a quarter of an hour, and a hot oven revives them better than a microwave.

Since panelle are almost never sold ready made outside Sicily, the thing to recognise abroad is the flour. Look for chickpea flour, farina di ceci, ground from whole dried chickpeas: it is pale straw, slightly coarse, and smells faintly of raw beans. Indian shops sell besan or gram flour, milled from split brown chana rather than the white kabuli chickpea, finer and more yellow, which thickens differently and gives a denser slab. French shops sell the same thing as farine de pois chiche. A finished panella is a thin matte rectangle two to three millimetres thick, firm enough to lift in one piece, that blisters and turns patchy gold in hot oil.

Several chickpea things get confused with it. Ligurian farinata, Tuscan cecina and Provencal socca are the same batter baked in a hot pan instead of fried, and come out as one large thin cake. Panisse from Provence is the closest relative but cut into thick batons. Falafel is ground soaked chickpeas, spiced and shaped, not a flour paste at all.

Chickpea flour is the only ingredient you need, and it is easy to find: Bob's Red Mill and Anthony's sell it across the US at $4 to $8 per pound, and any Indian grocery has besan for half that, which works identically. In the UK, gram flour is in every supermarket and every South Asian shop at £2 to £4 per kilo.

Ready-made panelle are effectively unavailable outside Sicily. A handful of Italian delis in New York, Boston and Toronto with Sicilian ownership sell them fried to order, and frozen sheets occasionally turn up in Italian importers. In Sicily itself, supermarkets sell frozen pre-spread panelle at €4 to €7 per kilo, which fry up perfectly well.

For the sandwich, look for a sesame-topped soft roll: a Sicilian mafalda if you can find one, a Portuguese roll or a soft burger bun if you cannot. It needs to absorb oil without falling apart.

Palermo, and specifically around the three historic markets: Ballarò, Il Capo and La Vucciria. Antica Focacceria San Francesco, open since 1834 on Piazza San Francesco d'Assisi, has been serving pane e panelle for nearly two centuries and is the safest first stop.

The fry shops and kiosks of the Kalsa and along the Foro Italico cook in front of you all day, which is the way to eat them: point at the pan that just came out of the oil.

Across western Sicily (Trapani, Marsala, Alcamo) they are everywhere. On the eastern side, around Catania, they are much rarer, because street food there runs to arancini and cipolline instead. If you are only in Catania, panelle are not the local speciality to chase.