How To Cook Puy 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 I'm going to show you how to cook lentils now, actually puy lentils.

Puy lentils come from le puy in France which is part of the Massif Central region. That's what they look like, goes particularly well with fish. I like to cook this with a stock, so as you can see I've got a boiling stock here on the go.

I'm just going to leave it for a second or to ‘coz I want the olive oil in this pan to come up to a nice temperature. Now it's not essential to cook these lentils with diced onions but you know I like to. I'm not going to cook these off for too long in part because I only got a very short period of time for the actual video itself but I just want to get those onions going which I've now done and I'm going to add these lentils which I washed earlier on straight to a pan.

Give them a bit of a mix. So I'm effectively frying them off with the onion just to get them on their way. You could if you like, add a little bit of alcohol now, some white wine if you wanted.

But what I'm going to do is just ladle some very hot stock into these lentils, there we go. That ought to do it actually, just turn that one down. Those have instantly come up to the boil.

Now puy lentils take about 15 minutes to cook so what we'll do is come back to those in about 15 minutes time. My advice as always is whilst your cooking, I mean there's quite a ferocious bubble going on there or boilbut what I would recommend is just keep tasting them as you go along and when you get that softness that still has a little bit of bite to them, that's exactly what we're looking to achieve. So as I say about 10/15 minutes those lentils will be ready.

So I've been adding hot stock to those lentils as I've been going along and the as I've been going along and they're now cooked perfectly so I'm going to take them off the hob and just plate up, there we go, the first time I ever cooked these was with breast of chicken with a little bit of balsamic vinegar and it was absolutely delicious, I can highly recommend it. so you saw the basic principles there, it was really just a question of cooking, as said earlier on I like to do it with a bit of onion, cook the lentils off, add some stock, you can use water if you like. Just carry on cooking them.

You know, 15 minutes is generally what it takes but keep tasting either side of that, you know because cooking times vary the dryness of the lentils will vary so that when you plate up you've got a nice softish lentil but it still got an al dente kind of bit to it. That is how to cook puy lentils.