How to Cook Dried Lentils and Beans: The Cheapest Protein in the Shop

A 500g bag of dried red lentils costs around £1.20 and makes roughly ten portions of dhal. That's about 12p a portion for the protein centrepiece of a meal. Nothing else in the supermarket comes close — not eggs, not tinned pulses, certainly not meat. If you learn one money-saving kitchen skill this year, make it this one.

The catch is that dried pulses come with folklore: overnight soaks, mysterious cooking times, warnings about kidney beans. Most of it is simpler than the internet makes out. Here's the whole subject in one honest guide.

The cast, from easiest to most effort

• Red lentils — no soak, 20 minutes, collapse into thick comfort. The gateway pulse.
• Green and brown lentils — no soak, 25–30 minutes, hold their shape. Great in salads, soups and ragù.
• Yellow split peas — no soak needed, 40–50 minutes. Pease pudding and gorgeous Greek-style fava.
• Chickpeas — soak overnight, then 1 to 1.5 hours simmering. The biggest flavour upgrade over tinned of anything here.
• White beans (cannellini, haricot) — soak overnight, 1 to 1.5 hours. Silky in stews and mash-ups.
• Kidney beans — soak overnight, then boil hard for 10 minutes before simmering until tender. That hard boil is non-negotiable: it destroys the natural toxin raw kidney beans contain. Tinned are already safe.

Soaking, minus the mythology

Soaking does two things: it shortens cooking time and evens out how the beans cook. Cover them in plenty of cold water before bed, drain in the morning, done. Forgot? Use the quick soak: cover with water, boil for two minutes, lid on, off the heat for an hour. Lentils and split peas skip all of this entirely, which is why red lentils are where everyone should start.

The one rule that matters during cooking: salt is fine (the 'salt makes beans tough' thing is largely myth — it actually seasons them properly), but acid is not. Tomatoes, vinegar and lemon juice slow softening dramatically, so add them only after the pulses are tender.

The method for beans and chickpeas

1. Drain the soaked pulses and tip into your biggest pot with fresh cold water — a good three fingers above the beans.
2. Add flavour to the water: half an onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a bay leaf if you have one, and a good pinch of salt.
3. Bring to the boil, skim off any foam, then drop to a gentle simmer. (Kidney beans: ten minutes of proper rolling boil first.)
4. Start checking at 50 minutes. They're done when three in a row are creamy all the way through — one soft bean is luck, three is a verdict.
5. Cool in their liquid, then portion into tubs or bags, tin-sized (about 240g drained per 'tin'), with a splash of the cooking liquid.
6. Freeze what you won't use in four days. They freeze superbly for months.

The 20-minute dhal that pays for this article

Soften an onion in oil, add two cloves of crushed garlic, a thumb of grated ginger if you have it, and a heaped tablespoon of curry powder. Stir in 250g of rinsed red lentils and 900ml of water or stock. Simmer 20 minutes, stirring near the end as it thickens. Season generously with salt and finish with a squeeze of lemon. That's four hearty portions for around £1 total, before rice. Once it's a reflex, it becomes the anchor of a batch cooking Sunday — dhal freezes and reheats like it was designed for it.

Tinned pulses buy you convenience. Dried ones buy you convenience next month, at a third of the price, if you cook them once in bulk.

Is it actually worth it over tins?

Honestly: sometimes no. A 55p tin of chickpeas opened at 6pm is a good deal too, and no one should feel smug-shamed out of it — tinned pulses are still the second-best value protein in the shop and half of our tomato-tin dinners use them. Dried wins when you cook a big pot once and freeze in tin-sized portions: chickpeas at roughly a third of the tinned price per portion, noticeably nuttier, with free golden cooking liquid that upgrades any soup. Dried loses when a bag sits in the cupboard for a year as an aspiration. Buy one bag of red lentils, make the dhal this week, and let the habit earn the chickpeas.

Five more things to do with a pot of cooked pulses

• Blitz chickpeas with garlic, lemon, and a spoon of peanut butter standing in for tahini — student hummus, absurdly cheap.
• Green lentils, a tin of tomatoes and whatever veg: a ragù that halves the mince in bolognese or replaces it entirely.
• White beans mashed into garlicky 'butter bean mash' — faster than potatoes and posher than it costs.
• Chickpeas roasted with smoked paprika until crunchy: snacks, soup toppers, salad croutons.
• Any pulse plus stock plus the vegetable drawer's stragglers, blitzed: soup, the eternal answer.

Storage and troubleshooting

Store dried pulses in jars or sealed containers away from light, and — this is the important one — don't hoard them. Pulses keep for years but get harder to cook as they age, and beans that have sat in a cupboard since the previous government can simmer for three hours and never soften. If a batch refuses to give in after two hours, age is almost always the culprit, not your technique; chalk it up, and buy from shops with high turnover (the world-foods aisle and Asian or Middle Eastern grocers are both cheaper and fresher, since they sell pulses by the sackful).

Two more fixes worth knowing. Very hard tap water slows softening — a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda in the cooking water counteracts it, though go gently or the beans turn to soap-flavoured mush. And if pulses give your household trouble digestively, start with small portions of the easy ones (red lentils are gentlest), always discard the soaking water rather than cooking in it, and let your gut acclimatise over a few weeks — it genuinely does. These are the cheapest calories and the cheapest protein in the shop; a fortnight of adjustment is a small toll for a permanently smaller food bill.

One bag, one pot, one afternoon. Your freezer fills with 12p protein and your food bill quietly drops. That's the whole trick.