This section is broken up into a couple of sub-sections, so feel free to jump around if you're looking for any information in particular.

The notes ended up a little longer than I expected, given that this is actually a very simple recipe to make.  The details are really meant to help out any home cooks who are either a) newer to Indian cooking, or b) have struggled to get the results that they expected from Indian recipes.  The notes on kitchen equipment are focused on maximizing the simplicity of your prep steps.  The cooking method variations section is a brief overview of the differences between stove-top and Instant Pot methods.  You'll also find a related note about canned vs dried beans.  Finally, there's a little note about fine-tuning flavours.  If you've ever felt that your attempts at Indian home-cooking have fallen a little flat, you'll definitely want to take the time to read that section.

South Asian home cooking is made much easier if you have a few specific kitchen gadgets to cut down on your prep and/or cooking time - but it's still very accessible if you don't.  I want to take a moment to explain a couple of cooking tools, including how they relate to this recipe, and how you can work around them if necessary.

Spice grinders are great, as they make it simple to use whole spices.  Whole spices last longer, and grinding them yourself generally delivers bigger, bolder, more complex flavours.

I have a small dedicated spice grinder, but a coffee grinder works great too.  If you're going to use a coffee grinder that you also use for coffee, note that it needs to be very clean, or you're going to get coffee-flavoured curry and curry-flavoured coffee.

No spice grinder? You've got two options.  First, you can use pre-ground spices.  This is certainly the easiest option, thought it is worth noting that pre-ground spices tend to diminish in terms of flavour fairly quickly.  Replenish your spices, preferably in small quantities, every few months.  The second option is to use a mortar and pestle to grind your spices.  This manual method is traditional and effective, but requires a good mortar and pestle (and time!) in order to get nice, finely ground powder.

When it comes to making sauces, curries, chutneys, and other recipes, a little mechanical help can go a long way towards saving you some serious time.  I personally own both a high-speed blender and a food processor, and I've used both for South Asian cooking.  They're both great, but aren't entirely interchangeable.  A food processor will (generally) yield small, finely diced pieces.  A high-speed blender, on the other hand, tends to create a puree.  The differences is especially noticeable (and important) when it comes to onions.  In a recipe like this, a food processor will yield finely diced onions, with some 'juice.'  A blender, on the other hand, will yield a very wet onion puree.  This is because blending (or grinding) more thoroughly crushes the cell walls of the onions, thus releasing more liquid.

The difference is important for two key reasons.  First, purees will yield smoother sauces, while a dice will yield more textural dishes.  Second, the moisture content of a puree makes it harder to scorch/burn, which is worth paying attention to when you're cooking the ginger, garlic, and onions.

I have both a high speed blender and a food processor, but I personally prefer making recipes like this with my blender more often than not.  This is partly because I like saucy curries, and partly because it makes it especially easy to incorporate the combination of ginger and garlic found in so many South Asian recipes.

No blender OR food processor? No worries - while it does take more time, you can finely dice all of your veggies by hand.  They'll soften further when cooking (especially if you use a pressure cooker).  If you have an especially large mortar and pestle, you can also use this to puree your garlic, ginger, and onions.

An Instant Pot or similar electric pressure cooker makes this recipe - and a whole suite of Indian recipes - ridiculously easy.  As long as you can use both pressure cooking and saute functions, you're good to go.

If you have a manual pressure cooker and you're comfortable using it, it should be pretty simple to adapt this recipe.

If you don't have an electric pressure cooker, you can simply follow the instructions for the stove-top method instead.

I love cooking with beans, but I've never been big on soaking them ahead of time.  It's not that it's difficult or anything - I'm just rarely organized enough to remember to do something like that ahead of time.  Thankfully, electric pressure cookers (e.g. Instant Pot) are both prevalent, and wonderfully easy to use for recipes like this.

This rajma masala recipe was definitely developed with the Instant Pot (or similar pressure cooker) in mind, but it's still easily adapted to a variety of other methods.  In the section below, I'll explain a few little details relevant to the various methods below.  It's also worth taking a peek at the notes on using dried vs. canned kidney beans, which are covered in the section after the next photo.

Definitely the easiest method, this is a wonderfully accessible way of cooking beans. Add in a food processor or blender for the prep and this becomes a genuinely weeknight-friendly meal.

There's not a lot too this method - if you follow the recipe card, you should find the whole process pretty straightforward.  I will caution you to pay attention during the saute steps, as you don't have any control over the temperature at this stage.  Don't burn your spices, my friends.

As always with pressure cooker recipes, be sure to budget time for the cooker to pressurize and depressurize.  Because we're working with dry, un-soaked beans, actual cook time is long (45 minutes), which means you'll need even longer to account for the beginning and the end.  If you want to speed the process up, you can pre-soak the beans overnight.  For more on this, check out the section on Dried vs. Canned Beans below the next image.

The stove-top method isn't quite as easy as the Instant Pot method, but it's still pretty darned easy - doubly so if you've got canned kidney beans, or if you're planning to cook your own beans separately.

Once again, the details of this method are laid out in the recipe card below, so I'll use this space to mention a couple of pointers.  First, this method gives you more control over the temperature that you saute and simmer at, which can be nice.  Second (and most importantly) ONLY use the stove-top method if you're using beans that are already fully cooked.  Dried beans, regardless of whether or not they've been soaked, will not cook on the stove-top in the time I've provided.

I use dry beans (here, and in general) because they're cheap, easy to store, and very quick to prepare with my Instant Pot.  If you don't have an electric pressure cooker and you don't have time to use dried beans, you can easily swap canned kidney beans into this recipe.

If you do want to swap in canned kidney beans, you'll need about 3 cups of rinsed, canned (and pre-cooked) beans.  It's easiest to use the stove-top cooking method if you're going to use canned beans (see the recipe card itself for more details).

There's a lot of conflicting information about soaking dried beans before using them in a pressure cooker.  Many recipes will tell you that soaking beans in water for 8-12 hours causes beans split less, or that they're less likely to make you gassy.  I'm not really convinced.  I don't bother pre-soaking my beans, but if you want to, you can.  If you do, make sure to discard the soaking water and thoroughly rinse the beans.  Soaked beans cook faster, so you'll also need to reduce the pressure cooking time from 45 minutes to about 15 minutes.   Allow the pressure to release naturally, then check the beans to see if they're sufficiently soft.  Soaked bean cooking time can vary a bit depending on the age of the beans and/or how long they soaked, so you may find you need to adjust a bit.

You can use dark or light kidney beans interchangeably here.  If you want to switch things up a bit, you can also use white kidney beans (aka cannellini).  White kidney beans have a milder, somewhat sweeter taste.  You might find that they disappear a bit against the bold flavours used in rajma masala, but they might also be more agreeable to any diners who are a little on-the-fence about kidney beans.

One final note about dried kidney beans: do NOT take shortcuts when it comes to cooking them!  Raw and under-cooked kidney beans are quite toxic thanks to a chemical compound called phytohemagglutinin.  This compound is broken down entirely after ten or more minutes at or above 100°C, rendering properly cooked beans perfectly safe.  Pressure cooking and boiling both achieve this, but slow cooking does not. In fact, slow cooking at around 80°C actually increases the potency of phytohemagglutinin!  NEVER use a slow cooker to cook raw dried beans unless they have first been boiled for 10 or more minutes.  Canned kidney beans are always pre-cooked, so there's no need to worry about the temperature they're re-cooked at.

Fine tuning a nearly-finished dish is an all-too-often overlooked aspect of good cooking, and it's one that's especially important in South Asian cooking.  Salt, sugar, herbs, fats (e.g. cream and butter), spices, and acidifying agents (e.g. lemon) can all transform a dish like rajma masala.

Every home cook is different, and we've all got our own little blind spots, but I suspect that missing salt is probably one of the biggest culprits when it comes to underwhelming homemade curry.  We've been taught to fear salt, but it's actually pretty tough to over-salt when you're cooking at home.  The average diner finds that a dish tastes properly salted (i.e. 'to taste') when the salt content of the finished dish is somewhere between 0.5% and 1% by weight.  This means that a recipe with a finished weight of 1 kg (2.2 lbs) should contain between 5-10 grams of salt in order to taste properly seasoned.  To give you an idea of what this looks like, 1 teaspoon of salt weighs about 7 grams.

Now, some salt does naturally occur in foods, and many processed foods contain a LOT of it.  I use canned tomatoes to make my rajma masala, and while these have very little salt added, you might find that some brands have quite a bit more.  This, plus personal preferences, is why we say 'salt to taste' in a recipe, rather than 'add 1 tsp salt.'  But it's important to remember that 1 tsp of salt really does look like a lot to most of us.  Dusting a few shakes from a salt shaker over the pot will add maybe 1 gram of salt to your recipe.  That's a fair bit for an individual serving, but it's not going to do much to a big pot of curry.

So what about other flavours? Adjusting to taste is a complicated subject, and if you want to learn more about it I would recommend practice and the phenomenal book Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. For this recipe, I would start with the cream (or butter) to add richness and a nice mouthfeel.  Then adjust the salt (more fat generally required more salt to taste right, hence the order).  After this, add the garam masala for an extra kick of warm spice flavour, then finish it off with herbs.  Don't skimp on the herbs either - I like cilantro, but if you don't, dried methi (fenugreek) is a delightful alternative.  If you don't have either of those, scallions or parsley are nice too.  If you're like me and you really like dairy creaminess with your curry, consider serving your rajma masala with yogurt or a yogurt-based side like cucumber raita.

Finally, remember that you're going to serve this with plain rice, so you want the flavour of the rajma masala to have a little extra oomph to make everything taste great together.