How to Cook Dried Beans and Lentils: Soak, Salt & Times

Hello lovelies,

almost every other post here ends with the same answer. Where does the protein come from? Beans and lentils. Where does the fiber come from? Beans and lentils. What do I batch-cook on Sunday? Beans and lentils.

What has been missing is the post about how you actually cook them. And that is not a small thing, because few foods are surrounded by so many kitchen rules that fall apart the moment you look them up. The most famous one is about salt, and it is still printed on countless recipe pages today.

For this post I went and read what food agencies and universities actually write. What came out is a short list that makes cooking simpler rather than more complicated, plus one safety rule for dried beans that everyone should know.

Do you have to soak beans before cooking?

Not all of them. Lentils and split peas can go straight into the pot, while chickpeas and large beans want 8 to 12 hours of soaking. That is the first fork in the road, and it explains half the confusion right there: apply a bean method to red lentils and you will wait for hours on something that would have been done in 10 minutes.

To soak, put the beans in a large enough container and cover them with roughly three times their volume of water, so 1 cup of chickpeas to 3 cups of water. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension puts it at 10 cups of cold water for each pound, or 2 cups, of dry beans. They drink up a lot of water and swell noticeably. Overnight in the refrigerator is all it takes.

Soaking buys you three things at once: shorter cooking time, better mineral availability, and part of the hard-to-digest sugars moves into the water. Which is why one rule has no exceptions: throw the soaking water away and cook in fresh water. That single step carries most of the digestibility benefit further down this page.

For cooking, the beans go into the pot with two to three times their volume of fresh water, come to a boil once, then simmer gently, covered, until tender.

And if you simply forgot to soak, nothing is lost. The Nebraska guide describes two shortcuts. For the hot soak, cover the beans generously with water, bring them to a boil for 2 to 3 minutes, take the pot off the heat, cover it and let them sit for up to 4 hours. For the quick soak, do the same with a little less water and wait just 1 hour.

The hot soak is the one that guide recommends above the others, because it cuts cooking time the most, dissolves some of the gas-causing substances and most consistently produces tender beans. Drain, rinse and carry on in fresh water exactly as you would after an overnight soak.

Soaking and cooking times at a glance

Cooking times sit far apart: from about 10 minutes for small red lentils to roughly 2 hours for large beans. Which is why the table below is worth more than any rule of thumb.

One note that appears in no table and still explains a lot: beans get harder as they age. A bag that sat in the cupboard for 2 years takes noticeably longer than a fresh one, whatever the printed time says. So when beans refuse to soften, it is rarely your fault.

Salt, acid and baking soda: what is actually true

Salt does not make beans tough. It actually shortens cooking time, because it loosens the cell structure of the skin. The Colorado State University Extension calls the opposite claim a common myth outright, and adds that salt also helps keep beans from bursting open while they cook. Germany's Baden-Württemberg nutrition center describes the same mechanism, which is a rare piece of cross-market agreement in a category this noisy.

The reason the old rule sticks around is a mix-up. Something really does harden the skin, but it is not the salt. It is the acid.

In practice that means three things. Salt the cooking water from the start, which tastes far better than salting beans after the fact. Add the splash of vinegar, the squeeze of lemon or the tomatoes only once the beans are already soft. And skip the baking soda when in doubt: it does shorten the cooking time, but it costs you thiamin and a little of the beans' own flavor.

One more thing worth knowing if your beans stay stubborn: hard tap water can keep them from softening at all, a point the Colorado guide makes specifically. In that case neither longer cooking nor more patience helps, only softer water.

Why dried beans need a hard boil

Do not cook dried kidney beans in a slow cooker. That is the single most useful sentence in this post, because the slow cooker is exactly where most people would put them. Raw and undercooked beans contain a lectin called phytohaemagglutinin, and it is destroyed by heat, which means the beans have to actually boil rather than sit warm.

The University of Illinois Extension spells out the numbers: beans in a slow cooker often reach only about 167 °F (75 °C), while the compound is reliably destroyed at 212 °F (100 °C). Heating raw kidney beans slowly can even make matters worse rather than better.

Red kidney beans carry by far the most of it. The FDA's Bad Bug Book notes that as few as 4 or 5 improperly cooked red kidney beans can cause trouble, and Kansas State University Research and Extension puts figures on it: raw red kidney beans run 20,000 to 70,000 hemagglutinating units, fully cooked ones only 200 to 400. White kidney or cannellini beans hold about a third as much, fava beans 5 to 10 percent.

The FDA procedure itself is short: soak the beans for at least 5 hours, drain off the soaking water, boil them in fresh water for at least 30 minutes, and only then finish them in the slow cooker or the pot. The 30 minutes are deliberately generous, since the compound breaks down at 212 °F within 10 minutes and the extra time simply makes sure every bean got there.

Two reassurances belong here. Canned kidney beans are safe without further boiling, because they were already processed properly. And lentils are not a concern: their levels are far lower and normal cooking time takes care of them. Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment reaches the same conclusion from the other side of the Atlantic and recommends at least 30 minutes in boiling water for fresh beans. If you feel unwell after a meal, talk to a doctor.

How to make beans easier to digest

The gas comes from indigestible complex sugars, mainly raffinose and stachyose. Our digestive system cannot break them down, so they arrive intact in the large intestine, where gut bacteria ferment them. That produces gas. It is not a sign of intolerance, it is simply biology.

The good news: almost everything that helps happens anyway when you cook them properly.

• Soak long enough and throw the soaking water away. A good share of the sugars leaves with it.
• Cook them long enough. Undercooked beans are the most common reason for discomfort.
• Rinse canned beans thoroughly, because the liquid in the can holds exactly the same sugars.
• Start with small portions and build up over weeks. Your gut flora adapts, it just needs time.
• Split red and yellow lentils are the gentlest way in, which is why they sit at the front of our pantry.

If you want to go further: sprouting breaks down up to 80 percent of these complex sugars, according to the Baden-Württemberg nutrition center. That is a project for the curious rather than for a Tuesday night, but it shows how much the preparation decides.

And one honest note belongs here too. Part of what causes the commotion is simply fiber, and fiber is very much the point. I wrote up why in my post on high fiber foods.

Canned or cooked from dried?

Both are right, and the honest answer is this: the can you actually use beats the bag you never soak. Canned and jarred beans are precooked, they need neither soaking nor cooking, and nutritionally they compare well. Rinsing is still worth it, because it cuts the sodium and some of the gas-causing sugars. Either way, beans and lentils remain one of the best plant protein sources you can keep on a shelf.

Cooking from dried buys you three things: a much lower price, full control over salt and seasoning, and the cooking liquid, which thickens a lot of dishes all by itself. The math is friendly too: 1 pound, or 2 cups, of dry beans yields about 6 cups cooked, and one 15-ounce can equals roughly 1¾ cups cooked and drained. In our kitchen it runs mixed. I cook chickpeas from dried because I go through a lot of them, and there is always a can of kidney beans in the cupboard.

These four show best how differently beans and lentils can land on a plate:

Protein pasta with chickpeas and lentils

Carrot-Lentil Soup

Vegan Caesar salad with chickpeas and crispy cauliflower

Chickpea herb pancakes filled with mushrooms

For how long cooked beans then keep in the refrigerator and how to cool them down properly, I gathered every number in the post on batch cooking and safe storage.

What is actually in our pantry

The biggest lever is not the perfect cooking time, it is whether something cooked is standing ready on a Wednesday evening. So the same four things are always in our cupboard: red lentils for anything that has to be quick, French green lentils for salads, a large jar of chickpeas and a can of kidney beans in reserve.

On Sundays I usually cook a big batch of chickpeas unseasoned, exactly the way I describe in the post on high protein vegan recipes. They travel through the week into salads, into a dip or into a skillet, and I never have to start from zero on a weeknight.

Here in Bali, legumes are such an ordinary part of daily life that it took moving here to notice how complicated we make the conversation in Europe. In Indonesian cooking, the fermented soybean known as tempeh is a weekday staple, and nobody treats it as a dietary philosophy. That changed how I look at the whole pantry shelf.

If you would rather put beans and lentils straight to work in finished recipes, there are 35 of them in my cookbook High Protein Vegan. Every recipe prints the protein per portion right there, and most of it comes from lentils, chickpeas and beans.

And this is how they land on our table during the week:

Creamy Edamame Hummus with Tahini and Sesame Oil

Cauliflower-Lentil Curry with dates

Minestrone with savoy cabbage and white beans

Loaded Vegetarian Nachos with Spiced Lentils

Lovelies, if you take two sentences away from this post, make them these: salt can go into the water from the start, acid only at the end. And dried beans want to boil, not to sit and steep. Everything else lives in the table and does not need to live in your head.

Tell me in the comments: which bean or lentil is the one that is always in your cupboard?

Yours, Verena

Recipes to try

Vegan lentil orange soup

Quick Vegan Chickpea Curry with Coconut Milk and Spinach

Parsnip soup with white beans

Lamb’s lettuce with apple & lentils