How to Reduce The Soaking Time for Legumes

Broad beans, beans, peas, chickpeas and grass peas: legumes are essential ingredients for our diet, incredibly nutritious, versatile and easy to cook. In whatever recipe we want to use them, dried legumes need to be soaked in cold water for a while: more or less long depending on the type of legume we are going to cook, soaking is important because it allows us to rehydrate the starch and fibers of the legumes and, of course, soften them to speed up their cooking.

Time, yes, but how long? The soaking hours vary, from "just" two hours for some types of lentils and peas to a maximum of 24 hours for unhulled chickpeas: if we intend to prepare a steaming soup or a cold legume salad, it is clear that we will have to remember to soak the legumes in the morning or the day before, well in advance. And what if, for whatever reason, we forget to do it? Will we be forced to give up our desire for pasta and beans? The answer, fortunately, is no: it is possible, with a few tricks, to overcome the problem and significantly reduce the soaking times of dried legumes. Here are two foolproof methods for doing so.

Quick Soak

To reduce the soaking time of legumes, we can opt for a quick soak, especially useful if we intend to prepare a dish with cicerchie and beans.

Wash the legumes well, cover them with five parts of cold water (for every 100 grams of legumes, we will use 500 ml) then bring to the boil and let cook for five minutes; turn off the heat and let them rest for about four hours. During the rest, the legumes will absorb part of the water and will swell, we will just have to drain them and rinse them briefly before starting our preparation.

Using the Microwave

Who doesn't have a microwave at home? We use it to heat, cook or defrost all types of food but perhaps not everyone knows that with this appliance we can also reduce the soaking time of any dried legume to less than an hour. All we have to do is pour the legumes into a microwave- safe container, cover them with cold water and turn on at maximum power for ten minutes. Once the necessary time has passed, we let the legumes cool in their water (it takes about forty minutes) before using them in our recipe.