A chickpea-buckwheat pie

The road to this one lead via juicy pancake plains.

A few months ago, I realised that I'm barely using the gram flour I have (which should be mostly chickpeas), mostly because the legumes most likely haven't been soaked and had a much stronger, somewhat bitter taste. At the time, I was experimenting with various flours for pancakes, as well as fillings. I was also playing around with leavened pancake dough.

A mention somewhere on the interwebs that chickpeas have some natural yeast and it's sometimes used in bread making sparked an idea. Why not use the flour which I probably wouldn't use otherwise to make pancakes?

My first thoughts after that were revolving around 'softening' the strong, punchy taste of the chickpea flour. I thought leavening using yeast might help, but it might not be enough. I wanted to make sweet pancakes anyway, so I have decided to try suppressing unwanted flavours with sweetness. I have also decided to make use of some buckwheat flour to add some nuttiness. I wasn't that keen on the taste of that pack of flour either (Dove's farm buckwheat flour), as it was a sort of nutty-bitter, not as fragrant as buckwheat should be.

Thus, the first iteration, as a pancake, was born, using:

300g of orange juice (with pulp)
50g of buckwheat flour
70g gram (chickpea) flour
5-10g yeast (a bit fuzzy on this)
1 medium egg

I mostly expected a disaster. However, after letting it ferment overnight, I was very pleasantly surprised in the morning. It just about quadrupled in volume. I tried making pancakes from it, getting smaller, pretty thick pancakes that looked more like small round pies rather than pancakes. The taste wasn't too bad either.
Next, I tried it with apple juice and one again with milk. Milk yielded disappointing results - no rise, taste like bitter(ish) watery chickpeas. Apple juice mixture didn't rise, but the taste was pretty good.
 
The pie experiments
 
I mulled the results over in my head and decided that the orange juice batter just might make a nice pie or cake corpus if it would rise in the oven.
I have experimented with varying yeast amount, dried fruit, spices and amount of batter in the baking tin to arrive to these (apologies for the poor photo quality and setup):

 

The best version so far:

300g of orange juice
60g of buckwheat flour
100g of chickpea flour
2g died yeast
1 medium egg
50g date paste (essentially dates blended in a food processor with a little bit of water)
150g raisins

 
Method:
Combine flours and yeast.
Mix in orange juice and the egg until you get a smooth batter.
Let ferment overnight (8-12 hours) in a narrow yet tall container.
Mix in date paste.
Put aluminium (kitchen) foil on the bottom of a smaller round pie tin so it covers sides as well and pour the batter onto it.
Sprinkle raisins on top of the batter.
Cover with aluminium foil.
Bake at about 180 degrees Celsius for 40-45 minutes, gas mark between 6 and 7 (old gas oven here).
After this is done, leave it to cool somewhat before removing the aluminium foil from the top. You can, however, lift it on the sides so it cools faster.
 
Notes: Cocoa can be overpowering and 5g is the maximum that didn't result in excessive bitterness. The batter doesn't rise much if cocoa is present in the overnight phase.
Raisins or any similar additions are best just sprinkled on top after the batter is in the tin - they will sink to varying depths.
Letting it ferment in a narrow yet tall container repeatedly resulted in a much better rise than in a wide one.
Please do let me know if you try this out and how you liked it.

Thanks for reading (first post here, too). :-)