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Coincidentally, I have recently been grinding my own chickpea flour out of
storebought, hard, dry chickpeas (garbanzo beans). I then cooked this up
into chipatis according to a recipe uploaded to this list earlier. They
were wonderfully tasty!

Today I looked in all my cooking references for warnings about the poisons
in chickpeas and red beans and I found none. I did find, in the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a reference to noxious alkaloids in legumes (peas
and beans) of all kinds. (Apparently locoweed is in this family.) But still
no specific warnings about any one that is normally eaten by humans. The
E.B. did say that these legumes eaten in large enough quantities would have
a toxic effect.

I suspect that, being alkaloids, these poisons wash (soak) out of most
legumes in the normal process of preparation. And that, when made into
flour, the combination of the fineness of the grind (exposing more of the
alkaloids) and cooking probably breaks enough of the toxins down to make
the flours safe for cooking. Particularly if you're not going to eat vast
quantities every day.

But maybe someone with more knowledge of the chemistry of alkaloids can
give us more insight?

Linda Blanchard
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Midland TX