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This is a recipe I’ve been using for a while. I sort of came up with it on my own, after tinkering with various recipes I found on the web. It’s very similar to a lot of “tempered” dal recipes found in cookbooks, but the spices have been adjusted to my own tastes.

If you look up recipes for dal on the internet, you’ll find hundreds. Maybe more. They all vary in details, like which spices were used, how much of each, when they were added, etc. Partly this is because India is a big country, with many distinct cuisines from different parts of the country. So dal cooked in the north won’t be the same as dal cooked in the south, or west, or east. Even within a region, there are dozens of variations. Mughlai style food uses a lot of different spices, but not a lot of each. South Indian food might use fewer spices, but some of them will be pretty strong – enough red-hot chilis, for example, to burn your mouth.

So this is my distillation of many such recipes that I have tried. I’ve stuck to what I consider are essential spices – those which I’d definitely notice a lack of, in the finished product. At the end, I’ve provided a short list of what else some people add to dal.

Which Lentils?

First, get the right sort of lentils. There are lots of different legumes or “pulses” eaten in India. While cooking methods for each are similar, they are not exactly the same. This recipe is for brown lentils (whole, not split), commonly known as “masoor” in India.

Brown lentils are very easy to find in most American supermarkets, but be aware they are not exactly the same as Indian brown lentils. Indian lentils are generally smaller in size, more rounded and less flat. They may look darker, though the darkness of supermarket lentils is variable, from greenish to reddish to brownish. Indian lentils have a much richer and more robust flavor.

Brown lentils can be found in Indian grocery stores, where they are known as “masoor dal”. Whole brown lentils, like in the picture above, are sometimes labeled “matki masoor”. It’s worth it to get the real thing and not the supermarket imitation. There really is a difference.

Ingredients and Method

This is a “tempered” dal, meaning, the dal is cooked in two separate stages, which are combined at the end. The purpose of tempering is to keep the butter and fat-soluble spices separate from the rest of the stuff, and cook them for a much shorter time, so the volatile oils in the spices mix in with the butter, and don’t disappear or acquire an off flavor due to the longer cooking time of the dal itself.

Take 1 cup of lentils (dry volume), and soak in 5-6 cups of cold water for about an hour. Then wash the lentils thoroughly in cold water.

In a large pot, add the following:

- the pre-soaked, washed lentils from the step above
- cold water – 4 cups
- turmeric powder – 1 heaped teaspoon
- amchoor powder (dried green mango) – 1 level teaspoon
- garlic – 3-4 cloves, peeled and crushed
- onion – 1 small onion, chopped
- ginger – either 0.5 teaspoon powder, or a half inch piece fresh, crushed to a paste
- bay leaf – 1
- salt: about 1.5 teaspoons, or to taste (kosher)

Bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer, cover the pot, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes to an hour, until the lentils are thoroughly cooked, but not mushy.

Meanwhile, prepare the “tempering” mixture. It will take about 10-15 minutes to prepare, so you can start working on it about 15 minutes before the lentils are cooked.

In a large frying pan, melt about 1/2 or 2/3 of a stick of butter. When the butter is hot, start adding stuff in the following order:

1. add half a teaspoon of cumin seeds, fry for about 30 seconds until the seeds start to crackle and pop and turn slightly darker. Don’t burn them.

2. add one medium chopped onion, fry it while stirring frequently, until the onion changes to a golden brown color. This is different from typical onion-frying instructions, which tell you to fry until it becomes transparent. You are not frying to extract onion flavor (it’s already there in the lentils from the other onion which you added to them). You are frying to caramelize the onions, to get the sweetish-caramelized-fried-onion flavor, so make sure they’re golden brown.

3. meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix these spices – 1 level teaspoon of red chili powder, 1 level teaspoon of ground cumin, 1 level teaspoon of ground coriander, 1 pinch of asafoetida powder. These are all dry powders, so put them in a small cup or bowl and mix them up. Then, after the onions have finished frying and turned golden brown, dump all these mixed spices into the frying pan.

4. Continue to fry for a while, stirring constantly to prevent the spices from sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning. At this point, you might want to turn the heat down to medium (if you had it on high while frying the onions), just to be safe. If it looks like there is any danger of burning the spices, have some water handy, and add a teaspoon or so to prevent burning. But they won’t burn if you turn the heat down to medium and stir constantly.

5. Fry until the oil starts to separate from the spice/onion mix. This can take anywhere from a minute to 5-6 minutes, depending on how hot your stove is, and whether there was any moisture from the onions remaining in the pan before you added the spices.

6. When the spices have fried, add half a cup of diced tomatoes (canned are fine). Continue to fry until the tomatoes lose their moisture and the oil starts to separate again, which could take another 5 minutes or so.

Bringing Everything Together

Now you are ready to combine the cooked lentils and the tempered spices. Remove the bay leaf from the lentils if it bothers you. Then dump the lentils (with cooking liquid and all) into the frying pan with the spices. Mix everything well. Reduce the heat to simmer, cover the frying pan with a lid, and let simmer for 5 minutes. Then turn off the heat, and let the frying pan sit on the stove for another 5-10 minutes before serving. If you like cilantro, you can sprinkle some fresh chopped cilantro on top, just before serving.

Dal is typically served over a bed of rice, usually basmati rice in North India, or shorter/stickier rice in South India. But it can be eaten with almost anything – Indian style “roti” or “paratha”, “nan”, etc.

Other Spices

Here are a few spices that I don’t use for dal, but some other people do.

1. Cardamom and Cloves: they sort of go together, if you add one, you usually add the other as well. If you were to add these, you’d use 4-5 green cardamom pods (cracked open) and 5-6 cloves. They can be added to the spice mix which goes in the frying pan, after the onions have finished frying. They can add subtle flavors, but I think they’re more useful for other Indian dishes, and other dals. Brown lentils have a more robust, earthy flavor, and don’t really need either of these.

2. Mace (known in Indian groceries as “Javitri”). This is sort of like nutmeg (in fact, it comes from the same plant), but with a milder flavor. Again, I would probably use it for a lighter and creamier dal, not for this recipe.

3. Fenugreek (known in Indian groceries as “methi”). This is actually not a bad thing to add. It has a characteristic smell, which will be more dominant than the actual flavor. A pinch or two of fenugreek added to the spice mix won’t hurt, and may possibly improve the taste for some people. Fun fact: fenugreek has been used for millenia by people all over the world, as a galactogogue – something that increases milk production in lactating women. Unlike some folk remedies, it actually works.

4. Carom Seeds (known as “ajwain” in Indian groceries). These are more common in South Indian style dals. I never add them. They have a flavor like thyme, only more powerful. You never, ever add them directly to the food. If you use them, use a small amount (1/4 teaspoon to start with), and fry them well in oil to temper them and make them milder.

5. Black Pepper and Garam Masala – These are both added to increase the “spiciness” of the dish. I don’t add either. Black pepper makes food hotter, and this dal is plenty hot enough with the powdered red chili anyway. Garam Masala is a mix of spices, many of which are already added separately in this recipe, and not needed. If you do add either, the best way would be at the end. Do not fry either black pepper or garam masala. Instead, when you add the cooked dal to the fried onions and spice mix at the end, add both or either of these directly to the food. They don’t need to be cooked.

Some Variations

Although dal with rice is very yummy (and healthy!) and can be eaten often, sometimes you will want to vary it a bit. Fortunately, brown lentils go well with a lot of stuff, so it’s easy to vary the recipe by adding something to it.

I usually add potatoes or spinach (one or the other, not both). For potatoes, use a low starch potato like yukon golds, which hold their shape after cooking. Take two medium potatoes (for the amounts in this recipe, which has 1 cup of raw lentils), peel them, and dice them into fairly small pieces. Add them directly to the lentils at the start, and cook along with them.

If you’re using spinach, take a pound of leaf or chopped spinach, and cook it along with the lentils. You might think that this is overcooking the spinach, since the lentils can easily cook for 45 minutes or an hour before they are done, while this is way too long for spinach. But remember, this is an Indian dish, and the purpose of the spinach is mainly to thicken the dal gravy and impart a flavor, so it works well this way.

How to Eat Dal

Most Indians eat dal with rice (preferably basmati), and that’s probably my favorite way to eat it as well. However, dal is very versatile, and there are plenty of other uses:

1. With bread, in a sandwich. If you have a sandwich grilling machine, leftover dal makes an excellent grilled sandwich. Take 2 slices of bread, butter each on one side, and put some dal in the middle (non-buttered side). Grill in a sandwich maker, or frying pan.

2. In salads. Cold dal goes great with salads. Just make sure it’s not watery, and that you adjust the amount based on the spiciness. You don’t want it overwhelming the salad.

3. With pasta. If I have leftover dal, I sometimes make a pasta sauce out of it. Warm the dal in a frying pan over medium heat. The dal should be fairly dry, so drain it first if it’s too watery. Add about a cup of sour cream per cup of cooked dal, stir until everything is well mixed and warm. Great with shell pasta or macaroni.

Finally, a note on the consistency of dal. If you follow the recipe exactly as described, you’ll have some water in the dal at the end. Remember, dal thickens when it stands, so you’ll end up with less water than you can see at the end of cooking.

This is actually perfect, if you’re planning to eat the dal with rice. Since rice is also dry, the moisture in the dal is a welcome addition. However, if you want to make a grilled sandwich out of the dal, or add it to pasta or salads, you might want drier dal. You can do this in two ways, either reduce the water in the recipe by up to one cup, or else take the lid off the pot during the final 10 minutes of cooking, and let some of the water evaporate. I prefer the second method, but it’s up to you.

I have some basic recipes in this blog – here’s how to cook rice, and here’s one for making Indian style black beans. It’s my attempt to make cooking approachable to someone completely unfamiliar with cooking. This is the state in which I found myself some years ago, when I first moved out of the parental home and started living alone. Cooking was a mystery to me, but food is very important, and I love home-cooked food. So I had to approach this completely on my own, with nothing but a few cookbooks and some long distance advice from my mother.

I am a fairly good cook now, but I prefer recipes that need little kitchen time and few ingredients. I don’t care if it takes 4 hours to cook, so long as I don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes in the kitchen. So in this blog I only write about stuff that is easy to make and doesn’t require a large commitment. Here’s my recipe for pork/rice with paprika. This is easily a main course for any meal.

Ingredients

• pork tenderloin: 2 pounds, defrosted
• rice: 1.5 cups, extra long grain, preferably basmati
• powdered paprika: about 2 heaped teaspoons
• powdered cumin: 1 teaspoon
• garlic powder: half a teaspoon
• ginger powder: half a teaspoon
• freshly cracked black pepper: half a teaspoon
• salt: to taste (I usually add 1-1.5 teaspoons)
• 2-3 medium onions, chopped
• 2-3 large green bell peppers, seeds removed, and chopped
• a couple teaspoons of oil: olive oil or canola
• 1 – 1.5 sticks of butter

Method

Start by turning on the oven to 450 degrees, and let the rice soak in a large pot with at least 2 inches of cold water covering it.

In a small bowl, mix all the dry spices and salt. Add enough oil to make a paste. Canola oil is best because of the high oven temperature, though you can use olive oil if you wish. Wash the pork tenderloins in cold running water, pat them completely dry with paper towels. Usually, tenderloins are sold in pairs, so a 2 pound package will have 2 tenderloins of approximately 1 pound each.

Put them in a roasting pan, and spoon the spice/oil mixture over them carefully. Spread the spice/oil paste until it completely covers the surface of the meat, making sure to baste both sides. Then adjust the tenderloins in the roasting pan so that they are about an inch apart, and the fat side is up. Pork tenderloins have very little fat, but they have a silvery membrane with a tiny bit of fat in it. You don’t have to remove the membrane, just put them with whichever side has more of the silvery stuff facing up. Make sure the tenderloins aren’t poking over the edge of the pan – if they are too long for the pan, fold the thinner end under itself so they fit within the pan.

After the oven has preheated to 450 F (the amount of time this can take varies with the oven, it will be at least 15 minutes if not more), put the pan with the tenderloins on a rack in the center of the oven, uncovered. Set the timer for 15 minutes at 450 F, to give the meat time to brown. After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 250 F. Continue cooking until the internal temperature of the meat reaches about 150 F. This usually takes about an hour at 250 F (not counting the first 15 minutes at 450 F). Don’t cook any longer than an hour at 250 F, or the tenderloins will dry out — remember, tenderloins have very little fat and can easily get dry if you overcook them. After they have cooked, remove the pan from the oven and let it sit on a counter for at least 15 minutes before messing with it any further.

While the tenderloins are cooking, cook the rice. Make sure it’s soaked for at least 30 minutes (45 minutes is better). Then wash the rice in 2-3 changes of cold water. Drain the water, then add a measured 2 cups of cold water to it. Bring it to a boil, then turn the heat to low, cover the pot, and let it cook for 25 minutes. After it’s cooked, remove it from the stove and let it cool down – with the lid on. Do not remove the lid to speed up cooling. It should be allowed to cool for at least 15 minutes before it’s used further.

Melt the butter in a large skillet (has to be large, eventually the rice will be dumped here as well, later in the recipe). Add the chopped onions and chopped green bell peppers, and let them fry in the hot butter until they are slightly brown.

At this point, you could add other spices to the frying onions if you wished. I sometimes add crushed dry red pepper, and some Indian spices, but they are not necessary.

If you time things right, the onions and peppers will finish frying about 15 minutes after the pork tenderloins are done and the rice is cooked. It’s important that both the tenderloins and the rice be allowed to cool on a counter for at least 15 minutes after removing from the stove or oven, before you use them further in the recipe.

Cut the tenderloins into small cubes (I prefer them really small, like quarter-inch cubes), and toss them in the pot with the onions and green peppers. There will be some fat that has drained out into the roasting pan. It’s not a lot, and it’s very flavorful. If you like, you can drain this fat directly into the skillet with the onions as well. If you’re trying to cut down on fat, oh well, don’t bother. Stir everything around for a minute or two.

Finally, dump the rice into the skillet. Turn the heat down to medium-low, stir occasionally to mix the rice in with the meat and fried onions/peppers/spices. The goal is the mix everything thoroughly, to coat the rice grains with butter from the pan so they don’t stick together. It’s now ready to serve.

Just before serving, I like to make a final check on the salt. If you had about 1.5 teaspoons of salt in the original spice rub used for the meat, and if you didn’t toss the liquid that drained out into the roasting pan, but added it to the skillet along with the rice, then you should have enough salt in the prepared dish. But if you tossed the roasting liquid or didn’t have enough salt to begin with, you might want to add a bit more to the skillet at this time. At any rate, you must check for salt before serving, very likely it will need some adjustment. The easiest way to ruin a dish, specially a meat dish, is to not have enough salt. Salt brings out the flavors in meat. I also add some chopped cilantro right before serving, but that’s optional. Mix it all up and serve hot.

Makes about 3-4 servings for hungry adult males. More, if you’re a girl.

Notes

This is very much “comfort food”, which I identify as basically any form of meat (roasted is more “comforty”) plus a starch, suitably salted. The starch could be rice or potatoes, both have their uses. This sort of food has a very primal appeal to our taste buds, possibly going back to when our ancestors first discovered the miracle of cooking, roasting meats and roots at their campfires. Onions and garlic and their botanical kin were probably among the first flavors to be added to food. This is an extra dimension that food holds for me, to be able to use it as a means to relate to our ancestors, to see and smell and taste what they did. Historical food has the same attraction, which is why I sometimes try out historical recipes from Roman times, or medieval food.

Like most stuff with spices, this can be easily refrigerated. If you are cooking for one, simply divide it up into portions in ziplock bags. It easily lasts 2-4 days in the refrigerator. Just nuke it in a microwave before serving.

Learning how to add salt is one of the earliest cooking skills that needs to be mastered. Unless you are following a recipe exactly, you’ll have to make a decision about how much salt to add. This is not a trivial decision; it’s one of the most important things you can do to enhance or ruin the flavor of food.

There is no exact science to it. Use good salt. Iodized salt sucks. I prefer kosher salt for general use, sea salt for specific recipes. Start by tasting whatever you intend to salt, to get a “baseline flavor”. Add salt sparingly, in steps. You can always add more, but taking it away is harder. Don’t dump it on to one spot in the food, sprinkle it evenly across all the food, then mix thoroughly and taste it. Does it taste better than the “baseline” taste? How does it taste different? You sort of have to learn this for yourself, because no one can explain to anyone else what “properly salted” ought to taste like. You have to experience it yourself. Adding salt in steps, a little bit at a time, then checking the taste, is the surest way to learn. After some time, you’ll be able to taste the food once, eyeball the amount of food, and know how much salt to add without measuring a damn thing. But it takes a little bit of practice. To me, the ideal amount of salt is that which makes the food just short of salty. Meaning, I shouldn’t be able to taste the salt specifically (unless I’m eating potato chips), but the flavors in the food should be maximally developed by the salt. You may prefer a bit more, but you will very likely not prefer less. Just experiment a bit and see what you like.

This line of thought was provoked by an article I read talking about the importance of cooking food in the development of modern humans.

I’ve come across a number of articles that talk about the importance of a change in diet in human evolution. The theory is that human diet suddenly improved dramatically, and this marked increase in the availability of calories and nutrients was responsible for the growth of the brain. The improvement in diet is generally tied to either the switch from a primarily herbivorous diet to meat eating, and/or to cooking.

Both make sense in terms of calories and nutrients. Meat is certainly a more densely packed source of nutrients than plants. And cooking increases the bioavailability of nutrients, as it breaks up cell walls and structures that hinder our digestive enzymes from reaching the goodies inside cells.

Of course, this still leaves us without an actual mechanism. Evolution requires heritable changes in the genome. These happen largely by  accident, though their selection depends upon what is advantageous to survival and reproduction. At this point, we don’t know very well exactly which genes are responsible for the differences in our brains, say compared to chimpanzees. We don’t know when these changes first appeared. We don’t know what connection they have to an improved diet.

So one part of evolution, that which is related to the genomic changes responsible for our large brains, is mostly unknown to us. Therefore, I think that ideas such as the change-in-diet leading to big brains scenario, tend to ignore the unknowns and focus only on the natural selection side of evolution. They make certain assumptions, for example, that a large brain will be selected, because it enhances survival and the chance to reproduce. This can be somewhat justified if one thinks about  it (large brains, specially the growth of the forebrain is what allows us to make long range plans, analyze complex problems, etc.), and also there is fossil evidence that shows that in fact it was selected. Then there is the assumption that a large brain requires a nutrient rich diet, which can also be justified on the basis of the caloric expenditure in maintaining a large brain. A commonly offered statistic is that for a person at rest, of the amount of energy required to stay alive, the brain uses 20%, or 1/5th. The brain is obviously much less than a fifth of the body in terms of mass, yet it uses an extraordinary amount of energy, in proportion. If you keep the total mass of an organism constant, but increase the size of the brain in proportion to the rest of its body, then such an organism will require a more nutrient rich diet. In effect, you have increased its energy requirements, but have not given it bigger jaws to chew food, a bigger gut to digest it, bigger claws to hunt with, etc.

In fact, both anatomy and the fossil record show that humans became less capable of acquiring food as their brains grew, if we look solely at such biological markers such as tooth/jaw size. Homo erectus had smaller jaws than his ancestors, which would have made it harder for him to grind foods down and extract the most energy from them. Our gut became smaller, and less capable of extracting energy from plants. Our muscles became weaker, less capable of overpowering other animals through brute strength alone.
One would think that the timing of these changes would have some correlation with our behavior or change in diet, or the control of fire (for cooking). Unfortunately, the timing is much harder to pin down. No one really knows when humans first learned to control fire. Homo erectus, with his small jaws, evolved 2 million years ago, but the evidence for the widespread use of fire by humans at this time is scanty at best. Most anthropologists don’t believe that fire was used by humans this early, at least, not in any regular, controlled manner, such as would be needed for cooking. Soft tissues don’t fossilize well, so while we can study humans and chimps today and recognize that the chimp gut is much more suited for eating raw plant material than the human gut, we don’t really know when we evolved our more carnivorous digestive systems.

This leaves a chicken versus egg conundrum. Which came first, the big brain or the adaptations to the big brain lifestyle? Which was responsible for the other? This may be a silly question on the face of it, because obviously one is useless without the other. What’s the point of having a modern jaw or gut if you don’t also have the bigger brains that give you the means for filling that gut with food? On the other hand, how do you sustain that brain and give it energy without eating a more nutrient-rich diet?

So it seems that speaking in terms of absolute causality, one thing causing the other is somewhat simplistic. They probably both happened together, one reinforcing the other, and happened gradually. We didn’t go suddenly from a chimp-sized brain to a human-sized one, as we know from the fossil record. There are many intermediate stages of the brain growing progressively larger. The change in diet, therefore, and the behavioral changes accompanying both the change in diet and the larger brain, must have happened concomitantly.

It’s interesting at this point to bring in the factor we’ve ignored all along – that there must be genomic changes that produce all the anatomical differences – jaws, teeth, gut and brains. These genomic changes also need to be accounted for, and tied into the selection mechanism. A high nutrient diet is obviously not enough; otherwise large cats such as lions and tigers would be smarter than us. They might not cook, but they eat enough high nutrient food to be able to support bigger brains. They have evolved as long as us, why didn’t they learn to cook,  why didn’t they evolve bigger brains?

This brings us back to selection, and fuzzier areas of anthropology such as social behavior and interactions, etc. We have bred dogs for a few thousand years, for example, and we have breeds of dogs today that look very different from each other. Not only is there is a difference in size and color of the fur, but there are also differences in the brain. Some breeds of dogs are smarter than others. We did this by a fairly simple process of selection – pick dogs that have the traits you want, breed them to produce a new generation, keep selecting for the desirable traits and reinforcing them through successive generations. Even with no knowledge of DNA or even Mendellian genetics, our ancestors were able to do this for dogs. We have also bred cows, pigs, goats, sheep, etc. – the modern domesticated forms of which are quite different from their wild ancestors. Not to mention the similar and parallel process of breeding food plants.

So even without postulating major and sudden changes in the genome, those which suddenly introduced a “game changer” mutation so far as the brain was concerned, it’s possible to see that humans could have become progressively smarter simply if the natural variation in smartness among a population was selectively reinforced over generations, the same way we breed dogs. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can breed dogs to a human level of intelligence, there may well be certain required mutations, and these have to happen first. You can’t select for what doesn’t exist. But at a point where we don’t fully understand the nature of these key mutations, we can’t really talk about how essential they were. Perhaps they could happen in other species too. Perhaps there are a dozen different ways to get the same result, and if mutation “A” doesn’t happen, mutation “X” can provide the similar benefits. I’d rather not speculate about this until we have more information to speculate with.

So I think such articles (as the one referenced above, which talks about the relation of diet to human evolution) speculate about the remainder of the problem, the mutually reinforcing effect of the selection of traits which are part of the natural variability of a population, and the behavioral consequences of selecting such traits. You set a species on a certain path, on which a greater reliance on the brain cuts out some options while expanding others, and the options that are promoted require even greater brain power to work well. It’s interesting to speculate what put us on this path, why we seem to be the only species on it. What set of circumstances came together at the right time for this to happen. The drying climate and spread of grasslands, the change from an arboreal to a savannah type lifestyle, the appearance of bipedality at this critical juncture when these big new ecological niches suddenly opened up, the development of more and more hand flexibility with a greater range of movement in the opposable thumb (compared to other primates), the social interactions, etc. There were so many changes happening at roughly the same time to the same species, somewhere this set us off on a path to bigger brains.

The article that set me off on this line of thought, of course, talks about something narrower. It talks about the relationship of cooking to gender roles, the development of the male-female bond, which is marriage today. This seems less an evolutionary question than an anthropological one. The evolutionary part is the importance of cooked food in the development of our brains, which I have speculated about. The anthropology part is relating this importance to something else, namely male-female pairing. I am not qualified to speculate about the anecdotal evidence offered about some primitive societies where food is more important than marital fidelity. Nor do I have any evidence that women tended the home fires, though it seems likely if men were the hunters and spent less time at the home camp. This seems to be supported by fossil evidence, such as hunting related injuries, as well as by anthropological evidence. You can speculate that the importance of cooked food was critical enough to shape our behavior patterns in other ways, such as pair-bonding between males and females. But just because a theory seems to make sense doesn’t mean it’s true, so I guess we’ll need to see some more physical evidence before placing much value on it.

Black beans, or turtle beans as they are sometimes called, are my favorite kind of beans. I was in Miami for a while, and ate a lot of Cuban black beans and rice, which is delicious. I like the beans + rice combination, since it’s a great protein source, and the beans and rice complement each other in terms of providing all the essential amino acids. Also, it makes a change from my usual high-meat diet. If you are vegetarian, this could be one of your main sources of protein.

Eventually, I learned to cook them at home. Since I like my food a lot spicier, I adapted the recipe to use a mix of Indian spices. This is a bit odd, because black beans are not common in India. But it’s very tasty.

Ingredients

• dry black beans: 0.5 pound
• chopped onions: 1 cup (you can increase this to 1.5 or 2 cups)
• garlic: 4-5 small cloves, crushed
• diced tomatoes: 0.5 cup (canned is fine)
• crushed, dried red pepper flakes: 1 tablespoon (or more, if you like)
• salt: to taste (I would add about 1.5 teaspoons)
• coriander powder: 1.5 teaspoons
• cumin powder: 1 teaspoon
• turmeric powder: 1 teaspoon
• asafoetida: a pinch (about 1/8 teaspoon or a bit less)
• dried green mango powder (amchoor): 1 teaspoon
• vegetable oil: about 1/3 cup (I use canola oil)
• chopped fresh cilantro leaves (optional)

Please note that “teaspoon” or “tablespoon” mean a level teaspoon or tablespoon. Don’t leave it partially empty and don’t heap it.

Method

Soak the beans overnight. This is very important, not optional. Use at least 8 cups of water for the half pound of dry beans in this recipe. Overnight means at least 8 hours, though 10-12 hours would be better. If your kitchen is very hot, you can put the soaking beans in the lowest compartment of your refrigerator to prevent fermentation. For average temperatures (around 75 F), this is not necessary, just cover it and leave it at room temperature overnight.

After they have soaked, wash the beans several times in cold water. You’ll notice that the water comes out black. This is stuff you want to wash away, so wash the beans in at least 5-6 changes of water to get rid of the black stuff. Or you can just pour them in a large sieve or colander and run fresh cold water through them for a few minutes, while stirring with a finger.

Put the beans together with half the chopped onions, salt, turmeric, dried green mango powder, garlic, diced tomatoes and 6 cups of fresh cold water in a pot. Cover the pot with a well-fitting lid, bring it to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for at least 2 – 2.5 hours, until the beans are thoroughly cooked.

When the beans are almost done, heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok – it doesn’t matter what sort of pan you use so long as it’s big enough to hold the cooked beans, which you will add later. Toss in a pinch of asfoetida and the remaining half of the chopped onion. Fry the onion until golden brown. Add the crushed red pepper, coriander and cumin, and continue to fry over medium heat for 1 minute longer. Pour the cooked beans (including all the cooking liquid in the pot) into the frying pan. Turn the heat to low, mix everything together thoroughly. At this point, you can add the chopped cilantro leaves if you’re using them. Some people hate cilantro, so it’s optional. Continue stirring for a minute or two, then cover the frying pan and turn off the heat. Let it sit for at least 5-10 minutes over the still-warm stove before serving.

Prepare the rice separately. I prefer Indian style Basmati rice. Here’s how to cook Basmati rice. Serve the beans over a bed of rice.

Notes

Most cookbooks say that you shouldn’t cook beans with salt or acids, because salt and acids increase the cooking time. This recipe calls for both (salt, acid in the diced tomatoes). I personally think that adding the salt and diced tomato at the beginning improves the flavor, and I don’t mind cooking the beans for 2.5 hours instead of 1 hour, to compensate. If you want, you can leave out the salt and diced tomatoes. Cook the beans until tender (will probably take 1 to 1.15 hours), then add the salt and diced tomatoes and cook for another 15 minutes to let the flavors mix in.

You can get all the spices used in this recipe at an Indian grocery. The “dried green mango powder” is known as “amchoor”. This is used for giving the food a slightly acidic taste. It’s not the same as adding lime juice: it’s a bit sweeter and has a richer flavor. You can use either amchoor or imli powder (imli is dried tamarind pods, also used for the same purpose as amchoor, and also found in Indian groceries). If there’s no Indian grocery handy, you can leave out the amchoor and asfoetida. The beans won’t taste exactly the same, but they will still be delicious. The rest of the spices are easily found at any grocery.

If you are in a hurry, you can also use canned black beans, or use the quick soak method. Canned beans do not require soaking: just drain the liquid, wash the beans thoroughly in cold water, then add the other ingredients and start cooking. You might want to reduce the amount of water from 6 cups to 5 cups. Other than that, recipe is the same. Canned beans are not as tasty as dry beans that have been soaked. For the quick soak method, take the dry beans and add 8 cups of cold water. Put it on the stove and bring to a boil. Let it boil for 2 minutes (don’t walk away at this point, you have to be near the stove to make sure you don’t boil for longer than 2 minutes). Then turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let it sit for 2 hours. Then you can wash the beans in cold water and proceed with the rest of the recipe unchanged.

Variations

For a change, you can add other ingredients to the black beans. Two things that go specially well with black beans are potatoes and spinach. This is how I would add them:

1. Potatoes: I use low-starch potatoes that hold their shape while cooking. This means any kind of white or red potatoes, or perhaps Yukon Golds. You can peel them if you want. I don’t usually peel them, but I scrub them well in running water. Then chop them up into small pieces, about quarter inch cubes. You can add them directly to the beans during the last 45 minutes of cooking. Just turn the stove back to high, while stirring, and wait for everything to come to a boil again after adding the potatoes. Then turn the heat back down to simmer and continue cooking. An alternative is to pat the cubed potatoes dry, put them on a plate and microwave on high for about 2 – 3 minutes before adding them to the beans. This ensures that they are hot (and partially cooked), so the beans continue to simmer even after addition of the potatoes. In this case, I’d add them a bit later, perhaps 30 minutes before the beans are done.

2. Spinach: I would use a pound of chopped spinach. If it’s frozen, turn up the heat on the beans when there are 45 minutes left on the cooking time, and add the frozen spinach. Bring it to a quick boil, turn the heat back down to simmer, and continue cooking for the remainder of the time.

There are probably other things you could also add in place of potatoes or spinach, though in my experience, those two are best. Avoid green peas or corn or carrots, or anything with a sweet taste — it doesn’t blend with the other flavors. Chopped zucchini is good, so are cauliflower florets. Just add them at the appropriate time to ensure that they are properly cooked, erring on the side of slightly overcooking. Indian style vegetables are not supposed to be crunchy. You sort of want them to hold shape and not fall apart, but otherwise they should be quite soft.

I’d like to start by saying that I am a great fan of Indian food, specially north Indian styles, such as Mughlai, Awadhi, Kashmiri, etc. I am lucky enough to live in a city which has lots of Indian restaurants, so it’s not hard to get Indian food. But since I also enjoy cooking, I don’t eat out that often, and prefer to make the same things at home.

North Indian rice is my favorite kind of rice – very long grains, not sticky or mushy, with a slightly nutty flavor. It goes well with almost any Indian curry, dals (lentils), or in rice dishes like biryani or pilaf. And it is so easy to make, but I see a lot of people mess it up for some reason, and end up with a mushy goo that looks and tastes horrible.

There is no single “right” way to cook north Indian style rice. Some people pre-soak, some don’t. Some add the rice to boiling water, some add cold water to the rice and let it all heat up together. Some people parboil the rice instead. Some start it off on the stovetop and finish it in the oven. All of these methods can produce excellent cooked rice, if done properly.

However, most of the time I use the method described below, because in my opinion it’s the easiest and it’s very hard to make mistakes when you use it. So here, without further ado, is how to cook north Indian rice.

Step One – Get the Right Kind of Indian Rice

There are dozens of varieties of rice eaten in India. For north Indian style cooking, you need to get Basmati rice, nothing else will do. You can apply these methods to other kinds of rice, as I mention later, but for now please forget that and just get Basmati rice.

Basmati is an extra-long grain fragrant rice with a slight nutty aroma, that comes from India. The best Basmati is from the foothills of the Himalayas (such as rice from Dehradun). Punjabi Basmati is also good. If you can, try to avoid American Basmati (Texmati), at least until you have tried Indian Basmati and can tell the difference in flavors.

Basmati comes in white grains (white Basmati) or golden – brownish grains (golden Basmati). White Basmati has more of the hull removed, and cooks faster. Again, if you’re new to cooking rice, stick to white Basmati, until you know how to cook it properly. Brown basmati is the same, except it takes longer to cook. I prefer white Basmati.

The better kinds of Basmati are aged. Aging decreases the moisture content of the grain, and improves the taste. Aging 1 – 2 years is typical for Basmati. This cooking method works for both aged and un-aged Basmati, with a slight difference which I’ll mention below.

Step Two – Pre Soak the Rice

This is a controversial topic. Some cookbooks recommend soaking, others don’t. It’s possible to cook good rice either way, but for this method, soaking is a must. If you don’t pre-soak and follow the rest of the recipe, you’ll end up with bad rice, because the rest of the recipe assumes the rice was pre-soaked.

Put the dry rice in a large pot, add cold water (about 3-4 times the volume of the rice) and let it sit at room temperature. I typically let it sit for 30 minutes to 1 hour, undisturbed. If you are using aged Basmati, you can soak for a bit less, but I’d still soak for about 20 – 30 minutes.

Step Three – Wash the Rice

You can wash the rice before or after the soaking. I do it after. When the rice has finished soaking, drain out the water. You can use a sieve or cheesecloth to drain if you want. I just tilt the pot and let the water drain out, using a cupped hand to prevent any rice from escaping. You don’t need to drain every last drop of water, just most of it.

Now add lots of cold water, stir the rice a couple times with your finger, and drain it again. Repeat this 3 – 4 times. Washing the rice in this way gets rid of loose starch around the rice grains, which will cause the grains to stick together unless it’s removed. Again, if you’re using aged Basmati, you can wash it fewer times, or even dispense with the washing. I’d wash it at least once anyway, it doesn’t hurt the rice.

Step Four – Cook the Rice

After the final wash, drain all the water. It doesn’t matter if a few drops remain, just not too much. Now add cold water for cooking. The general rule I follow is that I add 1.0 – 1.3 times the volume of water as the initial volume of dry rice. So for 1 cup of rice (measured when the rice was dry, before soaking), I would add 1 to 1.3 cups of water, depending on a few factors:

• If I drained it really well after the last wash (used a sieve or cheesecloth or colander), I would add more water, like 1.25 – 1.3 cups water per cup of dry rice. If I didn’t drain it so well, I’d adjust for that accordingly, by adding slightly less water.
• If you like you rice slightly chewy, add less water (1.0 -1.1 cups per cup of dry rice). If you like it softer and moister, add a bit more (1.2 – 1.3 cups per cup of dry rice).
• If the rice is aged 1+ years, add a bit less water. Just a tiny bit less.

Turn the stove to high heat and put the pot with the rice and water on it. Add some unsalted butter (about a tablespoon). Do not add salt or anything else. Bring it to a vigorous boil, stirring once or twice with a spoon to make sure the rice isn’t sticking to the bottom. Turn the heat down to simmer, put the lid on the pot, and let it simmer for about 25 minutes. Don’t open the pot during this time, don’t fuss with it at all. Just let it be.

After 25 minutes you can open the pot and test the rice. I usually pick off a couple grains of rice from the top with a fork, and taste them. If they’re done, remove the pot from the heat. If not, give it another few minutes. It can take 20 – 35 minutes to cook the rice, depending on the rice and your definition of “simmer”.

Step Five – Serve

After the rice has cooked, remove it from the stove, put the lid back on, and let it sit for at least 5 minutes. Then you can serve it. I take a fork and (gently!) scrape the top of the rice to loosen the grains, and then pour from the pot directly into a plate. Just keep scraping more of the rice loose with a fork and pouring until you’re done.

Some Extra Notes

Never, ever add more cold water to cooking rice, even if the rice appears dry. If you followed the recipe above, and check after say 20 minutes, you may find the rice not thoroughly cooked and the water all gone. Don’t worry, just put the lid back on and give it more time. If the heat is down to simmer, you can leave it for quite a while and it won’t burn. Check back at 35 minutes or so, and the rice should be done.

“Simmer” really means “simmer” – very low heat. Since stoves are different, you have to find out what the simmer setting is on your stove. Think of it this way: if you take a pot of plain tap water (with nothing added to it) and bring it to a rolling boil, then simmer would be the setting to which you could set your stove so that the surface of the water continues to gently steam, but isn’t bubbling. If you cook the rice at higher heat, you can turn it to mush. Or you can burn it at the bottom, making a mess of the pot. At “simmer” the rice is safe for a long time. I’ve accidentally cooked rice for as long as an hour, and it’s still quite edible. It gives you a wide safety range and allows you to stop cooking when the rice tastes right to you.

You can use the same method, with the exact same quantities of water for ordinary long grain rice, not just Basmati. Even the cheapo Riceland Extra Long Grain rice sold at most grocery stores (which isn’t Basmati, or even extra long grained – it’s just milled to make each grain thinner and look “long grained”) works well with this recipe. Each grain will be fluffy and separate. Of course, it won’t taste or smell the same as Basmati.