Cooking Dried Beans, Lentils and Chickpeas from Scratch

Tinned pulses are fine. I keep some in the cupboard for nights I forgot to plan. But cooking from dried gives you better texture, a proper savoury cooking liquid you can use, and beans that hold their shape instead of collapsing into mush. It also costs a fraction of the price. The catch is that dried pulses behave differently depending on what they are and how old they are, and most advice treats them all the same. They are not the same.

Know your three families

Lentils, split peas, beans and chickpeas all cook differently, so sort them before you start.

• Lentils need no soaking. Brown and green lentils hold their shape in about 20 to 30 minutes. Puy and other small dark lentils stay firm and are worth seeking out for salads, as in French Lentils With Garlic and Thyme. Red and yellow split lentils have no skin, collapse fast, and are made for dal like Dal fry, where you actually want them to break down.
• Chickpeas are the slowest and least forgiving. Old ones can simmer for two hours and still feel chalky. They need soaking and patience.
• Beans sit in the middle. Cannellini, borlotti, black beans and kidney beans want a soak and roughly an hour to an hour and a half, depending on age.

Age matters more than anything else. Chickpeas that have sat in a warehouse for two years will never soften, no matter what you do. Buy from a shop with decent turnover, and if a batch refuses to cook after the times below, blame the beans, not your method.

Soaking, and when to skip it

For beans and chickpeas, soak them overnight in plenty of cold water, at least three times their volume, because they swell a lot. If you are short of time, the quick soak works almost as well: cover with water, bring to the boil, boil for two minutes, then take off the heat, cover, and leave for an hour.

Soaking shortens the cook, helps them cook evenly, and washes out some of the sugars that cause wind. Tip the soaking water away and start fresh. Lentils and split lentils skip all of this entirely. Whole green and brown lentils only need a rinse and a quick pick over for the odd small stone.

The cook itself

Drain your soaked beans, cover with fresh cold water by about 5cm, and bring to a gentle simmer. A few rules that genuinely change the result:

• Skim the grey foam that rises in the first ten minutes. It tastes of nothing good.
• Keep it at a bare simmer, just the odd bubble breaking the surface. A hard rolling boil knocks beans about and splits their skins before the insides are done.
• Salt early. The old warning that salt toughens beans has been tested to death and it simply does not hold up. Salted beans season right through and hold their shape better. Add a good teaspoon or two per pot once they come up to temperature.
• Add aromatics to the water. Half an onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a bay leaf, a strip of dried chilli. You are building a stock at the same time as cooking the beans.

What does ruin things is acid added too soon. Tomatoes, vinegar and lemon juice stall the softening, so beans going into a tomato sauce should be cooked through first. This is why Kidney Bean Curry tends to come out better when the beans are tender before the tomatoes go anywhere near them.

One safety note that is not optional: dried red kidney beans contain a toxin that a slow cooker does not get hot enough to destroy. Boil kidney beans hard for ten full minutes on the hob before any low, slow cooking. This single step is the one you must not skip.

Testing for done, and the texture you want

Bite one. The skin should give with no resistance and the inside should be creamy and even, with no chalky dot in the centre. Taste three or four, because in any pot a few lag behind. For a salad you want them just tender and intact. For Hummus you want them properly soft, even a little overcooked, so they blend smooth. A pinch of bicarbonate of soda in the chickpea cooking water helps the skins slip and gives a silkier purée, though it dulls flavour a little, so use it only when smoothness is the goal.

Don't pour the liquid away

The cooking water from beans and chickpeas is a light, savoury stock. Use it to loosen a soup or thin a bean mash. Chickpea liquid in particular, the stuff sold as aquafaba, whips like egg white and is worth saving. A pot of beans in its own liquor keeps three or four days in the fridge and freezes well, so cook a big batch.

Turning a pot of beans into dinner

Plain cooked pulses are a base, not a meal. The quickest route to flavour is a soffritto: onion, carrot and celery cooked slowly in olive oil until soft and sweet, then beans and a ladle of their liquid stirred through. From there you are minutes from a bowl of Vegetarian Chilli, or you can press cooked chickpeas with herbs and spices into Falafel. Keep the seasoning bold. Beans drink up salt, acid and fat, so taste at the end and adjust harder than feels sensible.

Common mistakes, gathered up

• Cooking old, stale pulses and assuming you did something wrong.
• Boiling hard instead of simmering, which splits skins.
• Adding tomato or vinegar before the beans are soft.
• Skipping the hard ten minute boil on kidney beans.
• Throwing away the cooking liquid.
• Under seasoning at the end after being nervous about salt earlier.

Get those right and dried pulses become one of the cheapest, most useful things in the kitchen.