The formula behind every dal, so you can stop using recipes

Move one: choose the lentil

The lentil sets the cooking time and the final texture. Everything else is adjustable.

• Masoor, red, 12 minutes in an open pot, collapses completely. The fastest.
• Moong, yellow, 3 whistles, light and easy to digest. No soaking.
• Toor, 4 whistles, the everyday default across most of India.
• Chana, soak 30 minutes then 3 whistles, holds its shape, nuttier.
• Urad, whole, soak overnight then 8 whistles, creamy and heavy. This is dal makhani territory.

Move two: boil with turmeric and salt

Cook the lentil in three times its volume of water with half a teaspoon of turmeric. Turmeric is not decorative here; it goes in at the start because it needs the long cook to lose its raw edge.

Skim the foam that rises in the first few minutes. It is protein and it tastes bitter.

Then whisk. Properly, with a whisk or the back of a ladle, for a good thirty seconds. An unwhisked dal is grainy; a whisked one is creamy without any cream in it.

Move three: the tadka

This is where the character comes from, and it is thirty seconds of work. Hot fat, whole spices, aromatics, poured over the dal at the end.

The order matters and it is always the same: fat first, then whole spices that need to pop (mustard, cumin), then things that burn easily (garlic, dried chillies, curry leaves, hing), then anything that needs cooking (onion, tomato).

Ghee makes a noticeably better tadka than oil. If you use one spoon of ghee a week, use it here.

• North Indian: ghee, cumin, garlic, dried red chilli, hing
• South Indian: coconut oil or ghee, mustard seeds, urad dal, curry leaves, hing
• Gujarati: ghee, mustard, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, curry leaves, plus jaggery and lemon in the dal
• Bengali: mustard oil, panch phoron, bay leaf, dried chilli

Move four: balance it

Every good dal has salt, fat, acid and usually a little sweetness. Most home dal is missing the acid, which is why it tastes flat despite being correctly cooked.

Add lemon off the heat, or tamarind and jaggery for a Gujarati or Andhra version. Taste it before it leaves the pot and adjust. This step takes ten seconds and does more for the result than any spice you could add.

The additions that change the dish

Once the four moves are second nature, a dal becomes a base rather than a dish, and small additions turn it into something else entirely.

Spinach stirred in at the end makes dal palak. Bottle gourd cooked with chana dal makes lauki chana dal. Tomatoes cooked in with the lentil rather than in the tadka makes an Andhra pappu. Coconut and jaggery makes a Bengali cholar dal.

None of these are new recipes to learn. They are the same four moves with one thing changed, which is the entire reason the formula is worth having.

The mistakes that ruin an otherwise fine dal

Adding acid too early. Tomato, tamarind or lemon put in with the raw lentils will stop them softening, and no amount of extra boiling will rescue them. Cook the lentil first, always.

Burning the tadka. Garlic and curry leaves go from fragrant to bitter in about five seconds, and a burnt tadka poisons the whole pot. If it darkens past golden, throw it away and start again; it costs a spoon of ghee and saves the dal.

Under-salting. Lentils absorb a surprising amount of salt and a dal that tastes flat is nine times out of ten under-salted rather than under-spiced. Salt it, taste it, salt it again.

Consistency, which nobody tells you

Dal thickens dramatically as it sits, so what looks right in the pot will be sludge by the time it reaches the table. Make it looser than you want. Thin it with hot water, never cold.

A dal to eat with rice should pour off a spoon. A dal to eat with roti can be thicker. A Gujarati dal is nearly drinkable and served in a bowl on the side.