Chickpea Salad Sandwiches

Road Food: Good food that travels well

Whether you’re heading across the country, across the world, or simply across town, this series of recipes is made for life on the move. They’re easy to make, easy to pack, and taste just as good hours later as they do fresh from the kitchen. Perfect for road trips, picnics, hikes, airplanes, potlucks, packed lunches, busy weeknights, and anywhere else you need to go.

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Chickpea Salad Sandwiches

When I was a child in elementary school, I remember my mom packing sandwiches of bread, lunchmeat, cheese, and mayo into my lunch box. Or sometimes just cheese and mayo, which I honestly preferred to the ones with lunchmeat. My sandwich was not unique. Most of the kids in my class brought something similar.

I can’t be sure of the exact timeline, but I’d guess my mayo and lunchmeat sandwich sat at room temperature for roughly five hours. And it is only now, in retrospect, that I wonder why we didn’t all have food poisoning?

I can’t be the only one with memories like this.

These days, we are advised to never leave mayonnaise at room temperature for longer than an hour, two at most. Anything longer is taking our lives into our hands. It’s a rule I follow religiously. Anything with mayo must be eaten right away or refrigerated immediately. No exceptions.

Except… that’s the advice for practically everything. Even mayonnaise that’s made without eggs or dairy. It’s like a blanket rule of food safety. Everything, we are told, is a Petri dish of dangerous bacteria if it spends more than two hours in an environment over 40°F.

My friends, I have only had food poisoning twice in my life, and both times it was terrible. I would not wish it for you and hope to never experience it again. Both times it was after a restaurant meal. Not once was it from the sandwiches in my lunchbox, or the leftover chicken that sat out on the table for several hours while we were engrossed in conversation with friends, or from the pot of beans that I cooked in the morning and forgot about until midafternoon.

And yet, I do not want to eat anything that includes mayonnaise if it’s been sitting out at room temperature for longer than an hour or so. The two-hours-or-less messages are enough, apparently, for me to disregard the years of experience to the contrary.

One time, I packed chicken salad sandwiches for a long travel day and when I pulled them out of the cooler they didn’t feel cold enough to me. I was suddenly certain that the lunch I’d made was guaranteed to poison us both and tossed them out. We ate truck stop food instead, and as I type this, I am aware of how irrational it was to think that the food inside a truck stop was somehow ‘safer’ than the sandwiches I’d made myself and kept in a cooler with ice.

Like I said, I got the message.

When I pack sandwiches and salads made with mayonnaise on travel days, it’s always in a cooler packed with enough ice to practically freeze the contents.

When packing a cooler filled with ice isn't practical, I rely on a homemade mayonnaise that uses aquafaba in place of eggs. Aquafaba is the liquid in a can of chickpeas, which is just one more reason to make it when preparing chickpea salad.

Now friends, is the storage advice any different for egg-based mayo and non-egg-based mayo? No, it’s not. Two hours max, the experts say.

And still, I feel much better about packing a sandwich made with egg-free mayo and chickpeas if I’m not going to be fastidious about keeping it on ice. Hence, this recipe for chickpea salad sandwiches made with egg-free mayo.

If we are bringing these on a road trip, I still pack them into a cooler, but feel that an ice pack, or a ziplock bag with a handful of ice cubes, or a few cold-from-the-refrigerator cans of sparkling water are enough to keep the temperature inside the cooler to something safe.

But I would absolutely pack these in the morning for lunch, with or without an insulated container. I would also pack these into a backpack for a hike, or for a picnic lunch without feeling any pressure to hurry up and eat.

You should not, my friends, take this as any sort of authoritative advice. As my friend Betty Williams often says: You’re an adult. Do what you like.

But if you also feel less nervous about packing a meat-free, egg-free meal when you know it will not be consumed within two hours, this is a great recipe.

The egg-free mayo is creamy and delicious and takes about 5 minutes to make using a food processor.

The chickpea salad comes with plenty of options, of course, so I encourage you to play around with the ingredients and the amounts until you find a combo that makes your heart sing.

Eat the chickpea salad in between slices of bread, with crackers or flatbread, stuffed inside a pita, or rolled up in a wrap.

The day I made the sandwiches you see here, we had some marinated feta in the refrigerator, so I cut the cubes into thin slices and laid them on top of the chickpea salad. The combination was delightful.

If you’re a radish fan, a few thin slices will provide a delicious crunchy, bitter contrast to the creamy chickpeas. Or add some chopped nuts, celery, bell pepper, or even halved grapes. If it sounds good, it probably will be.

One final note to all the bakers in the room: If you have a morning at home and fancy a sandwich made from fresh baked bread, this is my go-to recipe: Homemade White Bread. I’ve been baking it for 30 years. If you have a stand mixer, the hands-on time is, like, 20 minutes because the mixer does all the work.

Sometimes, as I did in the bread you see in the photos here, I swap out some of the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour. Or sometimes I make this Honey Whole Wheat Bread. Both options will elevate your sandwich and give you toast then next morning that’s guaranteed to get your day off to a great start.

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