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Red Lentils

Greetings, comrades, to another episode of food science: the boring stuff. Herein we explore water, red lentils, and salt. The base is 100g of red lentils, which is about half a cup, good for a portion of a meal, and pretty easy to weigh the salt against: 1% salt is 1 gram of salt, 2% is 2 grams, etc.

250g of water results in lentils that are a bit chewy (al dente) so if you do not like that try using more water, 300g or even more. The package I have recommends 3 cups of water to 1 cup of lentils which would probably work out to something like 375g of water for 100g of lentils, though your error bars from not using a scale are probably large. On the other hand, boiling lentils is not particularly exacting. 150g of water is more problematic in that the lentils risk not being fully cooked, have the consistency of a thick potato, and can be very difficult to get off the pot. Perhaps with a simmer and a tightly closed pot a very low water boil could work?

Salt

0.5% salt is too low; the lentils were a bit too bland. This may work if more salt is coming from somewhere else, like maybe you marinaded some shallots and garlic in some soy sauce and lemon juice, and mix that in with the cooked lentils. Or maybe you have folks who can't have too much salt, or aren't into strong flavors (kids these days).

1% salt is good. The lentils are tasty. For half a cup of lentils this is about 1/8th teaspoon of salt, assuming the salt is a particular grain size. I used iodized table salt in all these tests.

2% is too high, especially if you are cooking for folks who do not like salty food. (And I tend to like salty foods!) You may want 2% if you have been out losing fluids in the sun, though other additions may then be necessary to hide the salt.

Weighing the salt is a bit of a bother, so it may be good to work out the scoop size necessary for the right amount of salt, and to test how often a scoop results in too much or too little salt.

For science! Now I can mostly go back to my usual habit of adding too much onions and garlic and whatnot to the lentils.

tags #food