how to make straightforward fast lentils when you need a quick meal to be ready

low-latency lentils

My friend texted me “tell me how to make straightforward fast lentils well when i need a quick meal to be ready”. This post is my reply to him. Imagine if every time you texted me I wrote a substack post in reply. “How is your day going” and “sorry i didn’t come to your party” would result in long-form screeds sent to everyone’s email.

what i do when you text me

I could just give you the answer, but I am annoying and will treat this as an Opportunity, a Teaching Moment, a time to Show You How to Fish. Warm up your patience muscle, it’s about to get a workout. We will begin with how to make lentils (dal) in general.

how to cook dal

The basic recipe template is

Step 1 (prep) depending on the kind of bean/dal, soak

Step 2 (liquid) create or choose a flavorful liquid to cook the dal in.

Step 3 (begin cooking dal) put uncooked dal and liquid over heat. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.

Step 4 (powdered spices) add turmeric, red chili powder and any other powdered spices.

Step 5 (adjust water until cooked) simmer with lid on. Periodically check texture, add water, stir, and scrape to prevent burned layer stuck at the bottom.

Step 6 (seasoning and herbs) once dal is cooked, adjust salt, acid and sweetness. Optionally add chopped herbs and/or leafy greens and stir.

Step 7 (tadka) heat oil in a pan. Add some subset of: whole spices, aromatics, hing, red chili powder. Pour on cooked dal and stir once to distribute. Optionally garnish with herbs.

Here’s an example recipe based on this template:

toor dal

stuff
2 cups toor dal
4 cups water
1tsp turmeric powder
¼ tsp paprika
¼ bunch cilantro
2tbsp cooking oil
1tsp cumin seeds
1 pinch hing
½ tsp paprika
salt
lime, amchur or vinegar
sugar

tools
saucepan

what do
1. (begin cooking dal) Put dal and water in a saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.
2. (powdered spices) Mix in the turmeric and ¼ tsp red chili powder.
3. (adjust water until cooked) Cover with a lid. Occasionally stir, add water, and scrape to prevent burned layer from forming in the bottom. Dal should have a liquid, soupy consistency.
4. (seasoning and herbs) Adjust salt, acid and sugar until it’s yummy. Stir in chopped cilantro.
5. (tadka) Heat oil in a pan. Once it’s hot, add cumin seeds. Once cumin seeds are ready, stir in hing and ½ tsp paprika. As soon as the paprika darkens, pour onto dal. Stir once to gently distribute over the top.

Legumes — lentils, peas and dals — are seeds. You buy them in dried form, and you must both rehydrate and heat them to make them edible and delicious. The rehydration and heating can be combined into one step, or you can do a separate pre-cooking soaking step. Some legumes must be soaked to avoid gastric distress. Most beans need to be soaked, and some other legumes too depending on your genetics and gut microbiome. If your tummy feels weird after you eat legumes that you didn’t soak, next time try soaking and throwing out the soaking liquid.

The rehydration liquid goes into the seeds, so you have a flavor opportunity: you can cook them in flavorful liquid and the liquid will carry its flavor into the seeds you’re cooking. But you don’t have to make use of this opportunity, and in fact most home cooks in India don’t. The example above is quite faithful to typical home cooking practices in India, where the “flavorful liquid” that the toor dal is cooked in is just water. That’s right, water. Fine, I add some turmeric and red chili powder, but those aren’t Big Deal flavors. They’re mostly there for color and a bit of heat.

how to make it fast 1: use the smallest possible seeds

The size of the individual seeds greatly influences how quickly dal will cook. The reason is simple: the larger the seed, the more time it takes for both water and heat to diffuse from the outside the center of the seed. Seeds cook outside-in and the rate of diffusion, of both heat and moisture, is roughly independent of the kind of seed. So the time taken is proportional to thickness.

So to make it fast, buy smaller lentils.

small guys finish fast

how to make it fast 2: use hulled, split legumes

Legumes are dicotyledons, so each individual seed has a skin and consists of two halves. You can buy them a few different ways:

1. whole, or sabut: skin-on and with the two halves still attached to each other

2. split and unhulled, or chilka: skin-on but with the two halves split from each other

3. split and hulled, or dhuli: without the skin, and with the two halves split from each other

The skin makes cooking slower because it acts as a barrier to moisture and an insulator to heat. It also holds the seed together, preventing it from breaking off, and therefore results in a larger effective average seed size.

Halving the seeds makes them smaller and therefore faster to cook.

So for the fastest cooking time you want dhuli dals: hulled and split.

i hope this image is effective as an aid to your memory that you want skin-off split legumes

how to make it fast 3: use high temperatures, perhaps under pressure

hot thing go fast

The higher the temperature, the faster the center of each seed will reach the critical temperature where it is soft enough to chew and be considered cooked. The temperature at which dal will cook is, at most, the boiling point of water, because you need to rehydrate the legumes and that means immersing them in water. Make sure that the liquid is actually simmering. If you have access to one, use a pressure cooker. Raising the pressure also raises the boiling point of the water, which means you’ll be cooking dal at a higher temperature and therefore faster.

how to make it fast 4: simplify and parallelize

Don’t try to make a flavorful liquid. Just cook the dal in water. As soon as you realize you’re hungry, dump 1.5 cups of dal and about 3 cups of hot water in a saucepan and set it over high heat. Now do any other prep. The minimum amount of prep here is very little: make a tadka of cumin and hing, which means no chopping onions, no slicing garlic, no knifework at all. Just get the spices, salt, oil and acid ready.

If you do want some aromatics in the tadka, prep them after you have the dal already on heat. Similarly, if you want herbs (like cilantro), wash and chop them after the dal is on heat.

how to make it fast 5: use an electric kettle to get the water hot

Electric kettles are incredibly good at dumping large amounts of energy into water very quickly. Instead of putting cold water from the faucet into a saucepan, get hot water from your faucet into an electric kettle, get the water boiling and then pour that into the saucepan. This shaves several minutes from the overall cooking time.

what about soaking?

Soaking will make the actual cooking process faster because

1. There’s less rehydration that needs to happen

2. Water is a better conductor of heat than dry lentil material, so the soaked lentil material gets heat to the center faster

However, soaking + cooking will take longer than just cooking. Only soak if you can remember to do that an hour or two before you want to start cooking. Personally, if I’m making a small, split, hulled dal, I don’t soak.

summary

1. Buy red lentils or moong dal. Both are split and hulled so they’ll cook fast.

2. Pressure-cook if you can, otherwise bring to boil and then reduce to simmer.

3. Do any chopping or other prep after you have the dal already in hot water.

4. Use an electric kettle to start the cooking water hot.