You’re gonna love these vegan chicken nuggets made with chickpeas and a crispy cornflakes crust! They’re super easy to make, pretty healthy, and SOOO delicious. Vegan comfort food at its best!
I used to love chicken nuggets before I became vegetarian and eventually vegan. But these vegan chicken nuggets or chickpea nuggets are sooo much better for you! And most of all 100 % cruelty-free!
They’re coated with a crust of cornflakes and panko bread crumbs, which makes them super crispy! The recipe is super easy and ready in about 30 minutes. And the baking time makes up most of the preparation time.
The Best Vegan Chicken Nuggets
What You Need To Make These Vegan Chicken Nuggets:
You will probably be surprised when you see the ingredient list. It’s not very long and you don’t need any fancy ingredients.
You’ll need:
- cooked chickpeas (either canned or you can cook them yourself)
- one onion
- garlic powder
- paprika powder
- mustard
- rolled oats
- nutritional yeast
- salt and pepper
- cornflakes
- panko bread crumbs
As always, you can find the full ingredient list and the detailed recipe instructions in a separate recipe box at the end of this post.
What Are Vegan Chicken Nuggets Made Of?
These vegan chicken nuggets are oven-baked, so you don’t need any oil to make them.
The inside basically consists of cooked chickpeas, rolled oats, and different spices. You need to have a good blender to make these vegan chicken nuggets as you need to process the rolled outs into a fine flour.
This is really important for the texture of the chickpea nuggets. Of course you could also use store-bought oat flour if that’s easier for you.
I like to serve these vegan chicken nuggets the traditional way with fries or wedges and ketchup. You can either use store-bought ketchup or make sugar-free ketchup at home.
How To Make Vegan Chicken Nuggets:
1. Step: Start by preparing the crust: Preheat the oven to 350 °F. Crumble the cornflakes with your hands in small pieces. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place the panko bread crumbs and cornflakes on top.
2. Step: Bake for about 2 minutes until golden-brown. Set aside.
3. Step: In a small pan, heat some oil and sauté the onion for about 3 minutes. Set aside.
4. Step: Then place the oats into your food processor or blender and process into a fine flour.
5. Step: Add the rest of the ingredients (including the cooked onion).
6. Step: Pulse until you get a crumbly mixture.
7. Step: Divide the chickpea mixture into 14 equal portions and form each portion into a nugget.
8. Step: Coat with some almond milk. Use a pastry brush to do this.
9. Step: Roll the vegan chicken nuggets in the baked panko bread crumbs and cornflakes.
10. Step: Place the coated “chicken” nuggets on a new sheet of parchment paper and bake for 15 minutes.
Recipe Notes:
- If you have problems finding nutritional yeast, you can also just leave it out. This will slightly change the taste of the vegan chicken nuggets, but they will still be amazing!
- Please not that the texture of these vegan chicken nuggets will be different from real chicken nuggets. The outside will be very crispy while the inside will be softer.
- Make sure to leave some texture when you process the ingredients in your blender. Some of the chickpeas should still be partially intact.
- I like to sauté the onions before adding them to the rest of the ingredients. If you don’t do this they will still be a bit crispy, which I didn’t like too much.
- I like to use my blender to process the rolled oats into flour because it’s much cheaper. But you will need to have a good blender to be able to do this. However, you could also use store-bought oat flour if you want.
Related Recipes:
- Cauliflower Hot Wings with Vegan Aioli
- Vegan Chicken Fingers
- Vegan Sausages
- Cauliflower Buffalo Wings
- Vegan Taquitos with Chipotle Sauce
I LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU GUYS!
I hope you like these vegan chicken nuggets as much as we do around here.
If you give them a try, I’d love to know what you think about them. Just leave me a comment and a star rating below. Your comments really make my day!
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Sina
Vegan Chicken Nuggets
Ingredients
For the chickpea nuggets:
- 1/2 cup rolled oats
- 2 cups cooked chickpeas
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
- 1 teaspoon paprika powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- black pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon mustard (yellow mustard like Dijon or French's mustard)
- 3 tablespoons water
For the crust:
- 1/2 cup panko bread crumbs
- 1/2 cup cornflakes
- 1/2 cup almond milk
Instructions
- Start by preparing the crust: Preheat the oven to 350 °F. Crumble the cornflakes with your hands in small pieces. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place the panko bread crumbs and cornflakes on top. Bake for about 2 minutes until golden-brown. Set aside.
- In a small pan, heat some oil and sauté the onion for about 3 minutes. Set aside. Then place the oats into your food processor or blender and process into a fine flour. Add the rest of the ingredients (including the cooked onion) and pulse until you get a crumbly mixture.
- Divide the chickpea mixture into 14 equal portions and form each portion into a nugget. Coat with some almond milk and roll in the baked panko bread crumbs and cornflakes.
- Place on a new sheet of parchment paper and bake for 15 minutes.
Notes
- If you have problems finding nutritional yeast, you can also just leave it out. This will slightly change the taste of the vegan chicken nuggets, but they will still be amazing!
- Please not that the texture of these vegan chicken nuggets will be different from real chicken nuggets. The outside will be very crispy while the inside will be softer.
- Make sure to leave some texture when you process the ingredients in your blender. Some of the chickpeas should still be partially intact.
- I like to sauté the onions before adding them to the rest of the ingredients. If you don't do this they will still be a bit crispy, which I didn't like too much.
- I like to use my blender to process the rolled oats into flour because it's much cheaper. But you will need to have a good blender to be able to do this. However, you could also use store-bought oat flour if you want.
This recipe looks great, and bc I *always* have chickpeas on hand (I cook about 10 oz dry every 10 days or so), I’m excited to try this soon. Thank you!
One fyi: I use my mini food processor to grind rolled oats into oat flour — it works really well. (I don’t have a full-sized one, so I can’t say whether that would work.)
These were simple but delicious, my 3 kids ate them all in 5 mins as a snack and then were upset there weren’t any more! Will make again! Healthy and yummy!
These are AMAZINGGGG!! Great flavor and texture and was super simple to make. Love the addition of Chickpeas and oat flour genius!! Out in air fryer and the turned out great. This is my go to from now on
Not exactly like chicken tenders, but the crunchy coating satisfied my yearning for them. Easy to put together and tasty. Will definitely make again. Thanks for developing and posting this recipe.
This was amazing! I had to use regular flour as I didn’t have any oats but it still turned out great. Came together so easily. My blender isn’t that great so I left a lot of chickpeas intact but I honestly couldn’t feel it when I was eating them. I also fried them in oil as I was short on time.
Hello – Recipe is great. Why is there a need to say “chicken” in the name. I thought veganism is getting away from animal based , but yet many recipes feel the need to make direct association back to an animal protein reference. Thank you.
Because no one would ever think to search Google for breaded chickpea oat nuggets. We grew up with meatloaf, meatballs, chicken patties, fish sticks, pork chops, chicken salad, deviled eggs, ham salad, etc. While we may be vegans now, this is the name we associate with it…names humans came up with in the same fashion as brownies, Caesar salad, Rice Krispies, bacon, or even tonkatsu…only now we do it without killing. Specifying that it’s vegan immediately removes all doubt, while keeping that familiarity tells us what it is. Perhaps, in a hundred or so years, we may have a far more agreeable name than “meatloaf” or “grilled salmon” or even “chicken nugget”, but we haven’t reached that time……..yet. ;-)
Okay so I loved these! I used a frozen onion (all I had) and my mixture was too wet but I continued on and just omitted the almond milk to help the crust stick. I also did not have corn flakes so I used all bread crumbs.
I wanted to try using the air fryer and the oven. The air fryer worked great! 15-ish minutes at 350 and they were perfect. The oven…. would have worked great if I hadn’t forgotten and left them in for an extra half an hour!
Overall, I am excited to try this recipe again and work out the kinks I encountered this past time.
Thank you for posting!
This is a great recipe; thank you for sharing! I found that my food processor couldn’t blend the chickpeas with the rest of the ingredients (the mixture got too sticky), and I didn’t want to use a blender that would mash the mixture too much. To have some texture, I put all ingredients except for the chickpeas in a food processor, and mix in this mixture while mashing the chickpeas in a bowl. I also omitted the almond milk and corn flakes. The nutritional yeast definitely gives this recipe a great taste.
Super flavorful! Nice texture ! I doubled the batch and have quite a few left overs, should I freeze the leftovers? Or should I keep them in the fridge? How long would you say these keep ?
I doubled the recipe but used a can veggies in place of extra chickpeas. Was worried because they were very sticky and mushy. But they turned out so great after baking them! Thank you!
I made this tonight with my two boys (8 and 11). They enjoyed both the process of making them and eating them. I was too lazy to cut/saute an onion so we used onion powder instead, like someone else had suggested. We made a double batch and the only complaint I have is that I found a blender (Vitamix) to be the wrong tool for this – maybe because I doubled the batch. After a minute of whirring and scraping down, resulting in a smooth paste at the bottom and no movement on top, I transferred everything to the food processor, which worked perfectly. Will definitely make again. Seasoning was great as-is but I’ll likely experiment a bit with spices next time, now that I know what I’m doing -sort of ;) Thank you for the recipe.
I did it with sojabeans. It was so good. My non vegan mum loved them sm:). I’m on my way to get her to the vegan side. Thank you
I made patties for sandwiches instead of nuggets but the recipe was amazing? Thank you 😀