Food
Lamentable Lentils
Red, brown, or green, they’re a go-to for winter soups, but typical American recipes do them no favors. Thankfully, there’s a better way.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by dianazh/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Liudmila Chernetska/iStock/Getty Images Plus, soumitrapendse/Getty Images Plus, Mizina/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and faithiecannoise/Getty Images Plus.
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A while back, I was tasked by the Kitchn with testing and rating six of the most popular online recipes for lentils. Though I already knew the basics of lentil cookery, I knew very little about how to actually make them delicious, so I was excited to sink my teeth into this assignment. And as I reached the finish line, having tested and tasted recipes that drew on a range of culinary traditions, two surprising things happened: One, I fell in love with lentils, having finally been initiated into the secrets to infusing this ancient, spirited legume with immense flavor. Secondly, I realized that America—or at least white America—has no clue how to cook them.
For too many of us, lentils are mostly an afterthought—the kind of “healthy” thing you might tolerate in a bland soup in January, but then forget the rest of the year, as resolutions quickly shed their resolve. This is cattle country, after all, a meat-eating nation. Just look at our newly unveiled upside-down food pyramid, where our brain-wormed secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has declared protein and saturated fat our saviors. And while I certainly don’t disagree with the idea that we should be eating less processed food, this new food pyramid sure seems to be propaganda for big beef and dairy. “We are ending the war on protein,” proclaimed the White House. Of course, anybody with eyes can see that, as with Christmas, there is no war on protein. If anything, we’re awash in a swirling protein vortex.
What’s interesting about lentils in this context, though, is that they are an excellent source of protein (about 12 grams per ½ cup of cooked). They contain fiber and vitamins, too. Not to mention they’re easy to grow and cheap as hell (for this exact reason they have sustained civilizations for thousands and thousands of years). But our current food pyramid, with a slab of cartoon steak crowning the top-heavy structure, makes a pretty clear statement: You only get your protein from meat, buddy. Well, call me a radical, but I’d like to change that. If lentils have any hope of truly catching on here, we’ve got to make these legumes radiate with flavor like the glimmering jewels they are.
I first suspected that we might be a lentil-deficient culture when I started testing the aforementioned recipes. Most of the recipes called for the most readily available grocery store lentils—red, green, and brown—each one containing a mildly sweet, nutty flavor and creamy yet firm texture once cooked. In other words, the ultimate blank canvas for flavor. One recipe in particular was stunningly flat: Ina Garten’s lentil sausage soup, which is a mix of soup vegetables (carrots, leeks, onion), chicken broth, and kielbasa. There was also the issue of too much broth, a ratio of 1 pound of lentils (about 2 cups) to a whopping three quarts of chicken stock. Meaning the lentils just sort of swam around aimlessly, separate from the other ingredients, resulting in watery spoonfuls of, well, chunky broth instead of creamy lentils. I had to be tactful in my write-up for Garten’s recipe, in keeping with the publication’s tone, otherwise I would have said that it’s an underwhelming disaster—tasteless and, even worse, thoughtless. Why was her lentil soup so bad? Because she cooks her lentils through an American lens. She treats them like chicken noodle soup.
Here’s another haunting example: The lentil soup from the blog Cookie and Kate, written by Kathryne Taylor. Her recipe for lentils calls for kale, vegetable broth, cumin, curry powder, and 1 measly tablespoon of lemon juice. It was depressingly mediocre, what amounted to kale soup with some lentils and sparse amounts of spice sprinkled in.
Compare this to a Lebanese soup stained yellow with turmeric, spiked with mint, paprika, cumin, and cayenne, and served with a slice of fresh lemon meant to be squeezed on at the end, which awakens the palate and cuts through the creamy, nourishing combination of blended and whole lentils. Or this recipe from the Mediterranean Dish, which uses six different spices, but also asks you to finish each bowl with lime juice. I was astonished at just how necessary the lime juice was, how it shook the lentils alive, and how the combination of myriad different spices completely dwarfed the flavor of both Cookie and Kate’s and Ina Garten’s lentil dishes. Not to mention, the ratio of lentils to broth in both of these recipes was much lower, and as a result, the lentils felt creamier. There was more of their wonderful texture, more earthy flavor, more lentil.
“Lentils are not just for soup,” I declared to myself, mouth full and happy. We should stop treating them as such. Stop shoving bland and blended lentils in cans and slapping them with the Amy’s logo. Lentils simply need more than many of us have been willing to give.
Shuba Shekar, a writer and cook I met in Detroit, is a vegetarian who grew up in Mumbai, India. More specifically, she was raised in a Brahmin household where they didn’t eat things like garlic or onion. For Shekar, lentils are a constant source of protein. But the lentils she eats are not at all like the lentils most people are used to eating here in America.
I tell Shekar, who now lives in the Bay Area, that I fear too many cooks are treating lentils like a soup filler, and she responds by telling me a story about when she used to make meal plans for Detroiters. “Most of them were born in America with no Indian heritage,” she says. She would make them flavorful versions of South Indian dal, vegetable curries, and other plant-based dishes rich in protein and nutrients. Her customers gushed over how flavorful each meal was, which at first struck her as unusual. Then, she realized, “I think they kept coming back to me because they didn’t know veggies could have this much flavor.” If you grow up in a white family, chances are you’re not inducted into the wonderful world of tasty lentils.
Shekar states lovingly that lentils need acid, often tamarind or lemon juice, depending on where you are in India. “We use a lot of citric base,” she says, meaning lots of tamarind, lemon, lime, vinegar, and oranges often get squeezed and mashed into the lentils’ vegetable base. “We cook our vegetables in a tamarind paste. The lentils kind of neutralize the [tamarind] taste.” So no, Ina Garten’s two tablespoons of red wine (her gesture toward acidity) to quarts of chicken stock is a laughable ratio, creating nowhere near enough tangy flavor to set off the lentils’ earthy funk and mild taste.
Shekar brings up dal tadka, a type of dal where stewed lentils are finished with a tempering of sizzling spices in ghee, a technique that she likens most to a chili oil. If you’ve ever had dal tadka, you know that sizzling ghee is a total flavor bomb and exactly the type of fat and spice that differentiate drab lentil soup from lentils as an exciting comfort food. Shekar starts spouting off spices to put into tadka: “Mustard seeds and cumin, green chile, crushed garlic, chili powder, cumin seeds, curry leaves.” I get the sense that if I had let her keep talking, she would have just kept naming spices, and I would have kept dreaming about how it all tasted.
Now compare the dal that Shekar loves to most American recipes you find on the internet—I’m talking lentil soup recipes that are rife with kale, brothy with low-sodium broths, built with celery, and featuring very little spice or tasty garnish. I fear this is symptomatic of the oft-disappointing American lens of cooking, which tends to fail vegetarian food.
Of course, not all Americans get lentils wrong, and I’m very thankful that we have so many chefs and home cooks of color in the U.S. trying to spread lentil awareness. For the best results in your kitchen, you should follow their lead. Start with India, traverse its regional flourishes for each lentil dish, experiment with coconut milk, curry leaves, tadka, and a range of spices. Follow the Silk Road to South Asia, to the Mediterranean, to Northern Africa.
Speaking of, this America’s Test Kitchen recipe for red lentil soup with North African spices really nails how to make lentils so damn flavorful. Erin McMurrer uses black pepper, ground ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, coriander, and cumin. She spikes the soup itself with lemon juice. “North Africans, they use a lot of lemon juice,” she says in a video accompanying the recipe, nudging the viewer not to be shy with their squeeze. To finish, she makes a tadka of ghee, dried mint, and paprika, then drizzles it on top. It’s plain as day to see this soup carries an immense number of flavors, layered on top of one another, from the base to the garnish. I mean, goodness, compare Ethiopian berbere spice (which can contain up to 20 different spices) to Ina Garten’s “cumin only” interpretation of lentils. It’s not even fair. There is no comparison. One carries true “depth of flavor,” while the other … does not.
Here’s a good rule I’ve formulated through my research: Follow lentil recipes that acknowledge the area of the world from which they’ve received inspiration, like the ATK example above. African, Ethiopian, Lebanese, etc. in the title signals that the recipe developer is aware of or staying true to the techniques of another country. I’d thumb through the NYT Cooking site for lentils riffs, which seem to be written thoughtfully and with the basic tenets of flavor in mind. Look to chefs of color (Padma Lakshmi’s sambar looks incredible) to guide you, and avoid cutesy blogs written by white chefs that list only one or two spices in the ingredients.
Lentils go back 13,000 years. A staple food of ancient Egypt and Rome, a legume that’s fed civilizations for millennia, and somehow they’re still ignored by most people in America. It’s time we understand that with the right cooking methods, lentils can be everything we need them to be. Heck, one day, maybe they’ll even take their rightful place at the top of that food pyramid—if we can ever get it, and this country, turned around.
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