Can a Ninja Blender Make Garbanzo Bean Flour?

Today’s topic comes to us from the comments section of the blog, where Kimberly asked if it was possible to use the Ninja Kitchen System to grind garbanzo beans – or other beans – into flour.

While I had never done this particular task before, I was pretty confident before starting that the Ninja would eat up the beans and effortlessly spit out flour. Being that I like garbanzo bean flour, as it makes a good binder in veggie patties and thickener in soups, I went with garbanzo beans for this little test.

Note: If you try this at home, be sure to soak your beans overnight and thoroughly rinse them before grinding to remove the toxic enzyme inhibitors (much like you would do prior to cooking.)

Since I felt confident in the Ninja for this task, to up the ante a little, I did a side-by-side comparison to see if just a normal food processor could handle the task. Dried beans are very, very hard – so I figured a head-to-head test might be interesting.

Here we have just a cheap Hamilton Beach Food Processor and the Ninja Professional Blender. Each have one cup of dried garbanzo beans ready to blend.

First up, the Ninja. I added one cup of dried beans.

Then, I blended on power level “1” for about 30 seconds to get things going before switching to power level “3” for about 90 seconds. Warning: This is loud.

After 2 minutes of blending, it really seemed that I had about as fine a flour as I was going to get.

So, I poured the flour into a bowl – and immediately realized it needed to be sifted. Out came my trusty mesh strainer and I quickly sifted the powder into a fine flour and separated rough kernels.

In the end, the yield was about 3/4 cup of very light, powdery flour – just like you’d buy at the store. You could probably “re-process” the leftover kernels and get even more, but I just didn’t fuss with that for today. The point was to see if the Ninja could produce flour, and it certainly can!

With a successful test complete, I set off to see how a traditional food processor would stack up. I added one cup of dried garbanzo beans, just as I had for the Ninja.

My food processor is very basic, so it doesn’t have speed levels. It just has “On” or “Pulse.” For this test, I put it in the “on” position and let it process for 2 minutes – the same amount of time as the Ninja.

Holy cow, if I thought the Ninja was loud, this sounded like a warzone in my kitchen!

After the allotted 2 minutes, here was the result:

It doesn’t look much different, does it?

The food processor portion of this experiment was a definite FAIL. The morale of the story –  you definitely need a high speed and high powered blender to make dried bean flour.

I hope you found this test helpful, and as always, if you have Ninja Blender requests, let me know in the comments section!