How To Cook Dried Lentils

Hi there! I'm Matt from the underground cookery school. And today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. So, today I'm going to show you how to cook dried lentils.

It's very, very simple. I'm going to take 40 grams of lentils which will yield an 80 gram portion, obviously their heavier once the moisture has been absorbed by them. 40 grams is fine for one person, those go in straight into a pan and what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover them with water but I'm going to leave an extra inch or so above where the lentils are.

On the hob and just crank the gas up, so what will happen is they'll come up to a boil and over the course of 10 to 15 minutes it does depend on how dry the lentils are, they're always different, they'll be ready the only way really of checking is tasting as we go along but what we'll then do is drain those, plate them up and that will be the perfect demonstration. So, those have been on the hob for about 15, 12 minutes actually. I'm perfectly happy with the texture and consistency, just drain those out a little bit more, dry lentils are great for thickening for example soup out, they're great in a curry, a dough, the other thing is vegetarians do struggle sometimes for new ideas and using a cooked lentil in something like for example, you took a Portobello mushroom and just stuffed it with those, i think could be a really nice meal but all I'm going to do now is just plate them up like so, what we can also do is just add some olive oil a, little bit of seasoning, so a little bit of salt and pepper.

There we go, and that is how to cook dried lentils.