How to cook pulses

Soaking, salting, and what really matters

Soaking shortens the cooking time and gives more even results, particularly for large beans. It is helpful and it is not essential — an unsoaked bean simply takes longer.

Salting during cooking does not toughen beans. This is a persistent myth. Salted cooking water actually helps the skins soften and seasons the bean throughout, which unsalted water cannot do afterwards. Salt from the start.

What genuinely stops beans softening is age. A bean that has sat in a warehouse for three years may never fully soften, however long you cook it. If a batch refuses to cook after hours, the beans are old and there is nothing to be done. Buy from somewhere with turnover.

Acid does slow softening. Add tomato, vinegar, lemon or wine after the beans are tender, not before.

Rough timings, soaked unless stated

Times vary enormously with age. Taste rather than trusting a clock.

Red lentils

No soak. 15–20 minutes. They collapse, which is usually the point.

Green and brown lentils

No soak. 20–30 minutes. Hold their shape.

Puy lentils

No soak. 20–25 minutes. Hold their shape best of all.

Split peas

No soak needed. 40–60 minutes.

Chickpeas

1–2 hours, and often longer. The slowest common pulse.

Cannellini, borlotti, haricot

45–90 minutes.

Butter beans

1–1.5 hours. Prone to breaking up, so simmer very gently.

Kidney beans

45–60 minutes, after a compulsory hard boil — see below.

The method

1. Soak overnight in plenty of cold water if you have time, or use the quick method: cover with water, boil for two minutes, then leave covered off the heat for an hour.
2. Drain the soaking water and cover with fresh cold water by a good margin.
3. Add salt, and any aromatics — a halved onion, a bay leaf, a garlic clove, a strip of kombu, a piece of bacon.
4. Bring to the boil, then reduce to the barest simmer. A rolling boil breaks the skins and turns the beans to mush.
5. Skim any foam in the first ten minutes.
6. Start tasting well before the expected time. A bean is done when it is completely creamy inside with no chalky centre — undercooked pulses are unpleasant and hard to digest.
7. Let them cool in their cooking liquid. This keeps them from drying and splitting, and the liquid itself is worth keeping.

Points worth knowing

• Red kidney beans must be boiled hard for at least 10 minutes before simmering. Dried kidney beans contain a toxin that this destroys, and undercooking them — including in a slow cooker at low temperature — can cause serious illness. Follow the Food Standards Agency guidance on this specifically; it is the one pulse where the method is a safety matter rather than a texture one.
• Keep the cooking liquid. It is savoury and slightly thickened and makes a far better base for a soup or a sauce than water.
• A pressure cooker cooks pulses in a fraction of the time and does it well. Chickpeas in twenty minutes rather than two hours.
• Bicarbonate of soda in the water softens skins considerably — useful for hummus, and it makes the beans mushy, so use it only when that is what you want.
• Tinned pulses are perfectly good. Rinse them, and simmer them for ten minutes with aromatics to improve them considerably.
• Freeze what you cook. Cooked pulses freeze perfectly in their liquid, so cook a large batch.

Common questions