Instructions

1. This is not a leather you eat as a leather. The sheet is an intermediate step: it gets crumbled to a powder that comes back as hummus with nothing but boiling water and a spoon of oil, which is why it is worth the two stages.
2. Blend the chickpeas, water and garlic to a puree about the consistency of apple sauce. Too thick and it will not spread; too thin and it takes half again as long.
3. Keep the chilli out of the blender and stir it in by hand afterwards. Blended, the heat disappears evenly into everything; stirred through, you get pieces of it, which is what the recipe is after.
4. Pour the puree onto a lined tray in a band and let it find its own level by tilting the tray. Chickpea puree is heavy and will not flow far, so spread it with a spatula rather than expecting it to settle.
5. Aim for an even depth rather than a thin one. A thick patch in a bean puree hides moisture better than almost anything else here.
6. Dehydrate at 52 °C for 11 hours, until the sheet lets go of the liner without stretching.
7. Peel the sheet off, break it up and lay the pieces on the mesh rack, then run it for a further 3 hours. The face that was against the liner has done none of the work yet.
8. It is finished when a piece snaps like a poppadom and crumbles rather than bending. Bean paste holds moisture deep in the middle, so test a piece from the centre of the tray.
9. Grind or crush the cooled pieces and pack them into canning jars, or vacuum-seal them with an oxygen absorber inside a doubled Mylar bag.
10. To bring it back, stir a quarter cup of the powder into half a cup of boiling water, leave it a couple of minutes, then cover it and chill it for two hours — it thickens as it cools. Beat a spoonful of olive oil through it before serving; that gives you about half a cup.