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I’m following the dal makhani recipe by Dishoom in London.

The recipe has two steps where the water the lentils are in is discarded and replaced with fresh water.

The first is the water the lentils are soaked in prior to cooking, which is a common step for dried pulses and beans.

After this the lentils are cooked in fresh water. This is then discarded and replaced with fresh water for the final cooking phase.

Is there a reason why both are discarded? Could one water replacement be skipped?

Edit: the recipe as written works fine, but I was curious why the water might be discarded twice as I’ve not encountered that with other recipes using dried beans/pulses.

stjep
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1 Answers1

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It's probably worth following that recipe as written at least to start with, but in general it's not necessary and may not be desirable to discard all of the cooking water.

  • This recipe discards the soaking water, but drains and retains the cooking water so some can be added back in.

  • This one seems to use all the cooking water but might be quite wet at the end. However it uses far less water for cooking the dal than the Dishoom recipe.

Skimming the foam off the top is necessary in both of these.

I suspect you could get away with reserving the water drained off in step 5 of Dishoom's recipe, then re-adding the quantity needed. It does seem a little wasteful given that replacing this water isn't an absolute requirement. You could try it both ways and see if you can detect a difference.

I can't find the recipe I use, but it's for a slow cooker, and definitely doesn't discard the water. Slow cooking also avoids skimming.

Chris H
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