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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
5 min
09/02/2026
Cooking chhole and rajma can be difficult, especially for those who are just starting to learn how to cook. Many beginner cooks become frustrated because they do not know how to control the cooking process (soaking, measuring, pressure cooking, and tempering) to create a consistent and delicious dish.
Many novice cooks find it difficult to prepare legumes such as rajma and chhole because of the potential for texture issues and blandness. However, legumes, like rajma and chhole, are essential ingredients in both traditional Indian and all-around global recipes, especially with respect to the upcoming World Pulses Day in 2026. Learning about the cooking process, beyond simply collecting ingredients, gives you the confidence you need to create consistently buttery, balanced, and satisfying dishes with both rajma and chhole. Mastering what needs to happen during each step (soaking, measuring, pressure cooking, and tempering) will make creating restaurant-quality legume-based dishes second nature.
Chhole and rajma are easily accessible legumes ideal for beginner cooks since they expand in size as they take on flavours with time. They allow for cooking with pressure, therefore reducing cooking time in the active kitchen. For both beginner cooks using a rajma recipe and those using a kabuli chana recipe, visual and textural clues provided by chhole and rajma allow for a straightforward method of determining if chhole and rajma are cooked to the desired level, without having to guess if they are done.
Soaking is an important process that must always be done when using dried chhole and rajma. By soaking the legumes before cooking, the legumes will be softened inside, allowing for even cooking and the reduction of cooking time using pressure. For beginner cooks using a rajma recipe, not soaking the dry legumes is typically the cause of splitting beans or having chalky beans at the end of the cooking process. Similarly, the quality of finished products from recipes of kabuli chana increases significantly when soaking is part of the preparation process instead of being thought of as an afterthought.
Using a pressure cooker allows for faster preparation of legumes, but the timing aspect is still important. For example, if you overcook the rajma, the beans will no longer maintain their shape; if you do not cook the chhole long enough, the chhole will remain grainy. Understanding how to use a pressure cooker to create moisture in the dried legumes and having a good understanding of how to use the pressure cooker to establish moisture will provide consistent results when following a rajma recipe and kabuli chana recipe.
The overall character of chhole and rajma is defined by the process of tempering. In addition to regulating levels of heat, the tempering process is responsible for releasing different levels of aroma and complexity. For those who are just beginning to cook these dishes, understanding how fats carry spice and how timing impacts the taste will allow them to learn how the tempering process is key in differentiating a bland rajma recipe from one that delivers satisfaction and will add warmth to the kabuli chana recipe.
Additionally, as new cooks develop a systematic approach to preparing chhole and rajma, their ability to use these legumes to supplement their meal preparation will become increasingly reliable. With World Pulses Day 2026 focusing on sustainable protein sources, understanding how to prepare a reliable rajma recipe or kabuli chana recipe should become both practical and timely for the novice cook.
In addition to demonstrating the need for patience and observation, cooking with pulses builds foundational skills that can be applied to cooking with other legumes beyond those used to make chhole and rajma. Many novices assume flavour results from using multiple ingredients, but legumes reward cooks who use restraint and structure. Soaking pulses creates a base; pressure cooking creates a texture for a given dish; and tempering defines the direction for that dish. By treating those three process steps as systems rather than specific instructions, a rajma recipe will become adaptable rather than rigid, and a kabuli chana recipe will become intuitive rather than frightening to complete.
