2025-01-10
In recent years I have often found myself making recipes that call for some type of small, dry coloured bean. For example:
When I’m making a traditional recipe from another country I like to use the actually correct ingredients until I have enough experience to make my own decisions. In many cases, that means hunting down the right kind of bean (e.g. urad dal) at a specialist Asian supermarket. And inevitably you will be faced with a decision like this:
In this case, since I was making a ‘black’ dal and the Dishoom book specifies ‘whole black urad dal’, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that I needed the one on the left. But as I had this experience time and again, I was left with some questions. Questions such as:
It was at this point that I decided to do some reading and found - well, mostly SEO spam. So what follows is my personal documentation of these various beans and how they relate to one another. I’ve excluded things that nobody is getting mixed up, like lima beans and kidney beans.
All beans come from plants in the legume family. Legumes can basically be divided into three categories:
The beans we are investigating all fall into the first category: dry seeds. These are known as pulses.
Seems simple enough. So what’s a peanut?
It’s the seed of a legume. And (I’d argue) we primarily grow said legume in order to produce these dry peanut seeds. So the peanut is clearly a pulse, right?
Nope! For classification purposes the peanut is primarily an oil crop, which means the seeds are not pulses.
So in practice the definition of a pulse is: it is in the list of things defined as pulses by the UNFAO. (I’m sure there’s a newer version of this definition than 1994, but my brain nearly melted trying to navigate the UNFAO/Codex Alimentarius website).
Let’s narrow things down to the specific set of pulses that we’re interested in here. Things that look like this (in an ‘I know it when I see it’ kind of way).
Image by Justin Cormack (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
I don’t believe that this subset of pulses has a specific name. In India they seem to be collectively referred to as dal, but that also implies that the bean has been split and its outer skin removed (we’ll get to that in a moment).
I have noticed that many people refer to any bean of this shape and size as a ‘lentil’. That is, at least from a pedantic standpoint, wrong. Lentils are specifically the seeds of the Vicia lens plant.
There are several other species that produce similar beans with different names. A non-exhaustive list:
Pulses generally look like the bean seed on the left of this diagram:
Image from UC Berkeley Botanical Garden
There are three key features we’re interested in:
Pulses are often processed into a different form than they started. The properties above lead naturally to this matrix:
| Seed coat | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intact | Removed | |||
Shape | Intact | whole, unhulled  Mung beans, image by Ivar Leidus (CC-BY-SA 4.0) | whole, hulled  Mung beans, image by Thamizhpparithi Maari (CC-BY-SA 4.0) | |
Split | split, unhulled  Urad beans, image by Thamizhpparithi Maari (CC-BY-SA 4.0) | split, hulled  Lentils, image by Shijan Kaakkara (CC-BY-SA 4.0) | ||
Notice, in particular, that the seed coat and cotyledon are often different colours. This is why, when you are looking for urad dal to make a ‘black dal’, you might find yourself looking at a shelf full of white beans. You are looking at beans that have had their seed coats removed to reveal the white cotyledon. It’s then not much of a step to infer that the seed coat must be black and so you are probably looking for the whole bean instead.
Of course, this simplicity breaks down somewhere - and it’s with lentils. Lentils come in a huge range of varieties, and they have many colours. For example: grey, tan, brown, green and red. There are even some fancy French ones with mottled exteriors.
Mottled Puy lentils, image by Jessica Spengler (CC-BY 2.0)
At this point, we’ve answered most of the questions I had at the start of this post.
These beans are all an unnamed subset of pulses. If a recipe tells you to put yellow split peas in something called a ‘moong dal’, you should probably look for a different one. Beans with the same name can have different colours due to variety and different processing of the seed coat. And yes, not everything is a lentil.
To round things off, I’ve condensed some useful identification information into this set of handy bean cards.
| Common forms | whole unhulled split hulled split |
| Traditional recipes | Moong dal (India, hulled split) Mango sticky rice (Thailand, hulled split) Moong khichdi (India, whole, hulled split) |
| Incorrect names | Yellow lentil Yellow split pea |
| Common forms | whole hulled split |
| Traditional recipes | Masoor dal (India, hulled split) Mujadara (Levant, whole) Lentil salad (France, whole) Mercimek köftesi (Türkiye, hulled split) |
| Incorrect names |
| Common forms | whole hulled split |
| Traditional recipes | Chana dal (India, hulled split) Hummus (Middle East, whole) Pae Hin (Myanmar, hulled split) |
| Incorrect names | Lentil |
| Common forms | whole unhulled split hulled split |
| Traditional recipes | Urad dal (India, whole) Medu vada (India, hulled split) |
| Incorrect names | White lentil |
| Common forms | whole hulled split |
| Traditional recipes | Erwtensoep (Netherlands, hulled split) Ärtsoppa (Sweden, hulled split) Ghugni (Nepal, whole) |
| Incorrect names |
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