Sharma’s cookbook, in fact, covers much more ground than beans. With his trademark emphasis on science, the former engineer looks at vegetables through the lens of their plant families (akin to how Deborah Madison approached “Vegetable Literacy” and Bryant Terry approached “Vegetable Kingdom”), with an unmatched sense of creativity and accessibility. “I can talk a lot about food science, but it should be for the home cook,” he told me from his home office in Los Angeles. “It should be practical and applicable so that even after I’m gone … the book will still be valuable.”
As a result, Sharma spends just as much time writing about the differences among vegetables in the same family as about the commonalities. Take potatoes: “I realized that vegetables from other families, unrelated biologically, if they had starch, a lot of the same techniques cross over because they’re biochemically similar but biologically, family-wise, completely different.”
That brings us back to those black lentils, which are part of the pea or bean family, but don’t require the same cooking approach as what Sharma calls HTC (hard-to-cook) beans. Lentils take up water more quickly and typically can cook in under 30 minutes. Black lentils take a little longer than other varieties, but that same quality helps them hold their shape and stay a little firm during cooking.
Why put them in lasagna? Those firm lentils contribute to what Sharma calls the “interplay of textures” in his take on the dish. He often puts dal makhani on nachos and in lasagna, so for “Veg-table” he decided to streamline the approach for the latter.
There’s no arguing with the simple fact that what results from this combination (and a spice blend of garam masala, Aleppo-style peppers and turmeric) straddles the lines between comforting and exciting, satisfying and healthy.
Two shortcuts can help turn this lasagna into a weeknight-friendly endeavor: The first, of course, are no-boil noodles, which let you skip — well, it’s right there in their name. The second is a can. If you’re lucky enough to find canned black lentils such as Westbrae Naturals brand (I’ve also seen microwaveable pouches at Target), they can speed up this recipe considerably.
As Sharma, ever on the lookout for home-cook-friendly approaches, put it in reference to canned beans: “If it makes cooking easier, use them. If you want to soak and cook your beans from scratch, do it. The only person who needs to have a say in this is you.”