Pantry staples are the key to flavorful soup

Red lentils are an ideal legume. For one thing, they’re quick to prepare, cooking up in less than 20 minutes, with no presoaking or brining required.

But the best thing about cooking red lentils is that unlike other beans and legumes, you don’t need to worry about getting the interiors of the beans to soften before the skins rupture. With no skins to contain them, red lentils disintegrate when you cook them. In countries like Egypt andMorocco, cooks embrace this inevitability by turning their red lentils into soup. They add them to sauteed aromatics, stir in somewarm spices, and then simmer it all in broth orwater. Less than half an hour later, they have a satisfying soup.

To develop our own recipe, we started by sauteing onions in butter and used thewarmmixture to bloom fragrant spices, like coriander, cumin, ginger and a pinch of cayenne, found inNorth African versions of this soup. We used tomato paste and garlic to complete the base before adding the lentils, whichwe cooked in a mix of chicken broth andwater to give the soup a full, rounded character.

After only 15 minutes of cooking, the lentilswere soft enough to be pureed. But hauling out the blender or food processor seemed like overkill for such a simple soup. We swapped the wooden spoonwe’d been using for awhisk. Thirty seconds of whisking did the trick: We had a coarse puree thatwas homogenous fromtop to bottom.

Following the lead of North African cooks, we added 2 tablespoons of lemon juice to the pureed soup. The effectwas like adjusting the focus on a manual camera: All the flavorswere instantly more vibrant and defined. A drizzle of spice-infused butter and a sprinkling of cilantrowas allwe needed to complete the transformation of commonplace ingredients into an exciting yet comforting soup.