Salt your beans before you cook them, not after

A pound of dried beans. A gallon of water. Three tablespoons of kosher salt. Stir it, cover it, leave it on the counter overnight.

That single step fixes most of what's wrong with the beans coming out of your kitchen, and it directly contradicts what somebody told you years ago about salt making beans tough. It doesn't. Salted soaking water softens the skins, because the sodium works on the minerals holding those skins rigid. Soft skins mean the bean cooks through without blowing apart, and it means the seasoning is inside the bean instead of sitting on the outside like a coat of paint.

Unsalted beans taste like wet paper no matter how much salt you stir in at the end. You can't season the inside of something after it's already cooked. That's the whole reason people think they don't like beans.

The bean that never softens is just old

You've had this pot. Two hours in, three hours in, and the things are still chalky in the middle. You blame your stove or your water. It's the beans.

Dried beans don't last forever. After a couple of years they stop taking up water properly and no amount of simmering will bring them back. A bag that's been on a store shelf through two Christmases is a bag of gravel. Buy from somewhere with turnover, and if you find a place selling beans by the pound out of bins that visibly empty, buy there.

If your water is hard, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda in the pot helps the skins give up. Don't get enthusiastic with it. Too much and the beans go slimy and taste faintly of soap, and there's no coming back from that.

Acid last, always

Tomatoes, vinegar, wine, lemon, a splash of that vinegar-based hot sauce you like. All of it goes in after the beans are tender, not before.

Acid locks the skins shut. Put canned tomatoes in at the start of a pot of white beans and you'll be standing at the stove at nine at night wondering why they're still crunchy. Same with a smoked ham hock that's been cured hard, though that's less common.

Cook the beans plain and well-salted with aromatics, then build the dish around them once they're soft. Half an onion, a few smashed garlic cloves, a bay leaf, a wide strip of orange peel if you're feeling it. A glug of olive oil in the pot does more than you'd expect. It keeps the surface from foaming over and it rounds everything out.

Keep the pot barely moving

A hard boil is what splits beans and turns the pot cloudy. You want lazy bubbles breaking the surface every couple of seconds. On most stoves that's the lowest gas setting with the lid cracked.

Figure an hour and a half to two hours for soaked beans on the stove, longer for chickpeas, less for lentils and split peas. In a pressure cooker, soaked beans take a fraction of that, but the machine cooks aggressively and will turn delicate beans into paste if you overshoot. Start low on the timer. You can always put the lid back on. You can't un-mush a bean.

Taste for doneness by eating three of them, not one. There's always one liar in the pot.

Don't pour the liquid down the drain

That cloudy, starchy broth at the bottom is the best thing in the pot. It's the sauce. Drain it off and you've thrown away everything the beans gave up over two hours.

If your finished pot is soupy, take a cup of the beans and their liquid, blend it or mash it with a fork, and stir it back in. It thickens instantly and it thickens with bean, not with flour. That's how you get that glossy, spoon-coating texture at a good Italian place.

Store beans in their liquid too. Beans kept in broth stay plump for four or five days in the fridge. Beans drained and bagged dry out and go mealy by Wednesday.

Canned beans, for the record, are fine. I use them on Tuesdays. Rinse them if you're putting them in a salad, keep the liquid if they're going into soup. Nobody's handing out medals for soaking overnight.

Lentils are four different ingredients

This is where most people go wrong, and it's not their fault. The bag just says "lentils."

• Brown and green lentils cook in about 25 minutes and then immediately start falling apart. Good for soup, bad for anything you want to see individual lentils in.
• French green lentils hold their shape and stay firm and a little peppery. These are the ones for a salad with vinaigrette, or spooned under a piece of fish.
• Black beluga lentils also hold. They look good on a plate and they cook fast.
• Red and yellow split lentils dissolve completely in 20 minutes, and that's the point. They're for dal and for thickening soup. Trying to make a lentil salad out of red lentils is a losing afternoon.

None of them need soaking. All of them need salt in the water, and all of them need acid at the end. A lentil without vinegar or lemon on it's a sad thing.

Cook your grains like pasta

Farro, barley, wheat berries, brown rice, wild rice. Stop measuring water.

Bring a big pot of well-salted water to a boil, dump the grain in, and cook it uncovered until it tastes right. Then drain it in a colander and let it steam dry for five minutes. That's it. No ratio, no scorched bottom, no lifting the lid to check and losing the steam.

Brown rice is the big winner here. The absorption method gives you gummy rice with a crunchy core because the water runs out before the bran has hydrated. Boiled like pasta for around half an hour, drained, then rested in the dry pot with the lid on, it comes out separate and chewy and actually good.

The trade-off: some flavor and some water-soluble nutrients go down the drain with the cooking water. If that bothers you, cook them by absorption and accept that you'll need to fuss more.

Toast first, either way. Dry grain in a tablespoon of butter or oil over medium heat until it smells like popcorn, maybe three minutes. It changes farro completely.

Crisp something on top

The reason a bowl of beans and grain feels like punishment is that every bite is the same soft thing. Fix the texture and the whole dinner changes.

Fry a few sliced garlic cloves in olive oil until they're just gold and pour the oil and garlic over the top. Toast breadcrumbs in butter. Throw a handful of cooked chickpeas into a hot dry skillet with oil until the skins blister and pop. Chop raw celery and parsley into a lentil salad so there's something that snaps.

Then finish with acid and more salt than you think. Grains and legumes swallow salt. What tasted seasoned in the pot will taste flat on the plate, so season it again in the bowl.

The guy at your table who says he doesn't like beans has never had one that wasn't gray.