Mistakes to avoid when cooking daal
A quick and easy to read summary of everything I’ve messed up in the past!
In my previous Spinach Daal article, I wrote at length about the various caveats when making daal and how to avoid them. I then realised that instead of burying them in an article on a different topic, it’s probably worth writing a separate, short piece summarising them on their own for everyone’s benefit.
So here they are, at least the ones I can remember right now!
Filtered Water
When cooking the lentils, try to use filtered water instead of tap water, especially if you live in a hard water area. Sometimes my lentils don’t cook properly and although I’m not 100% certain, I suspect that using hard water from the tap was the cause of this. They need to become softer as they cook.
Soak times
Different types of lentils have different soak times and I mention the appropriate soaking time in each of my recipes.
Here are the soaking times I use for the lentils I typically cook with:
- Masoor (red or brown)— a lot of people don’t soak it at all, but I prefer to soak it for 30 mins — 1 hour.
- Toor (split pigeon peas) — 2 hours.
