Play With Your Food Episode 12 - Lentils

Hi everybody I'm Marc Dunham, chef for the Atherton Hotel and Ranchers Club.
Last week I told you that we were going to start examining the mypyramid.gov website. So what better place to
start cooking some of this stuff than right here in the basic food lab with all of our nutrition students.
So join us as we
create some nice tasty lentils and alternative to your meat sources right here on Play With Your Food.
Welcome back guys.
So here I am standing in the lab of science and food preparation right here with all these nutrition students.
What better place to start talking about some of these subjects.
Most of the time
when we talk about protein, people's minds tend to go right to meats. So chicken and beef and things like
that, but
there's a whole other world out there we get protein. Technically speaking,

you need anywhere from about 4 to 6 ounces of protein a day. Now
there's a simple method
for exchange program that you can look on the website that we'll give you later,
where you can balance out
what 4 ounces of chicken breasts looks like
versus lentils.
We're not going to worry about that right now because I'll have that information on the website later. We want to
start talking about how to cook lentils and what they are. I've got a sauce pan that will
start getting warmed up.
While this is getting warm
I'll get a little bit of olive oil. I like to use olive oil, canola oil,
peanut oil. All high in monounsaturated fats.
So we've got olive oil that's going to go in the pan.

Smells in here are really good today. They're baking a lot of things that are sweet.
The olive oil will get warmed up and remember with extra virgin olive oil you never want to get it too hot because it'll
start to smoke,
and it'll turn a little bitter.
I've got a little bit of minced fennel,
a little bit of minced red onion,

and a little bit of minced
carrot
all going in the pan first. And again make sure you season as you go so you understand where
you are in the process
so you're not trying to season everything towards the end.
A little bit of kosher salt.
Sound like there's a lot of activity in the pan
so I'll turn down the burner just a touch.
Give this a stir. I don't know how many of you have eaten or eat lentils on a regular basis.
I love them
because they taste good, they're good for you, it's a good way to get protein
and they're super cheap. You can buy a bag for like $1.25.
As this is sweating down, since this is such a small cut it won't take long to soften up.
I'm going to go ahead and add
a little bit of canned tomato product. We're talking maybe a couple tablespoons,
and add a little bit of curry powder. You can buy this stuff at the store.

There's all sorts of
varieties.
Try to buy something that looks authentic.
Generally American curry powders don't pack as much flavor.

A little curry powder and just to give you a reference that's probably about a quarter teaspoon.

Turn the burner back up just a touch.
I'll go ahead and put my lentils in. These are French green lentils. You can buy brown lentils. You can buy
any lentil at the store.

The basic understanding is just knowing how to cook them and the ratios
and just tasting them as you go.
I've got about a cup of lentils to go in.
The ratio that you can use for lentils as a general ratio, this hold true for every single one,

is roughly about a three to one ratio of liquid to dry. So a cup of lentils is about 3 cups of
water to keep it
on the vegetarian side. So the burner turns up.
Got some water here.
Right at 3 cups.

In goes the water.
I'll add just another pinch of salt for good measure.
Now,
getting this stuff to a simmer you can turn the burner on high.
As soon as it comes up to a simmer

you'll cut back the burner
to where you just see a few bubbles popping on top. If the burner's to high the liquid will burn off too quickly
and you'll be left with raw lentils. If the burner's too low
they'll be cooked and you'll be left with a bunch of water. You want that nice
middle of the range where you're simmering it probably
if you stuck a thermometer they're probably be about 190 degrees or maybe a touch lower.
So I'll switch burners and get you a product that we already have ready because this will actually take about
40 minutes with these particular lentils. Some take about 25 to 30 and again it's lentil to lentil.
So those'll stay on the back burner cooking and if you're asking me how I know which lentil cooks quicker,
that's the fun part about the show is
taste them as they go. If you're not sure how quickly they'll cook and you've got
a lentil never used before,
if the smallest one takes about 25 minutes then test it at 10 minutes. If it doesn't taste cooked
keep cooking.


These lentils are just going to
warm up and these have all the ingredients that we had in the pan.
And the way that we serve these
at the Ranchers Club is just over
a little bit of jasmine rice. Jasmine rice you can buy at the store. You cook it roughly the same method as the rice
pilaf from one of the earlier videos.

And again like with everything else
you'll want to
season this just a touch.


We'll spoon these lentils right over the rice.



This is your complete protein. You don't need to add chicken on top of lentils to get your complete protein.


We'll garnish with a little bit of
chopped cilantro


and a little bit of unsweetened
natural yogurt.
A good alternative
to sour cream and also matches all the flavor profiles
of this dish. So that's it.
Pretty straight forward, pretty simple.
I'll have the recipes posted

so you can go back and
double check all the ingredients and all the ratios.
It's as simple as that. If you've got 30 minutes you can make something
just as delicious and as good for you.
Thanks for joining us this week. Join us next week again where we start to demystify mypyramid.gov.