Rajma Masala Recipe: Punjabi Rajma Chawal for 4, in Grams

Updated 11 min read serves 4 • 12 hour soak • 3 tbsp ghee

For this rajma masala recipe for four, soak 1 cup (185 g) of chitra rajma for 12 hours, pressure cook it until every bean crushes with no chalky centre, then simmer it for 15 to 20 minutes in an onion-tomato masala fried in 2 tablespoons of ghee. Mash a ladle of beans to thicken the gravy and pour a garlic tadka in 1 more tablespoon of ghee on top. A bowl comes to about 290 kcal.

How do you make rajma masala at home?

Soak the beans overnight, cook them soft in a pressure cooker, fry a deep brown onion-tomato masala in ghee, and simmer the two together until some of the beans break into the gravy. The soak takes 12 hours; the cooking takes about an hour, and most of that is the cooker and the onion. The garlic tadka at the end is where the ghee is tasted most.

Ingredients (serves 4)

  • 1 cup (185 g) chitra rajma
  • 3 tbsp ghee (38 g): 2 for the masala, 1 for the tadka
  • 2 large onions (about 300 g), finely chopped
  • 3 medium tomatoes (about 370 g), puréed
  • 1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste, 2 green chillies slit
  • 1 tsp cumin, a pinch of hing
  • ½ tsp turmeric, 1½ tsp Kashmiri chilli powder, 2 tsp coriander powder
  • 1 tsp garam masala, ½ tsp kasuri methi
  • For the tadka: 4 garlic cloves sliced thin, ½ tsp Kashmiri chilli
  • 1¼ tsp salt, 3 cups water for the beans, 2 tbsp chopped coriander

Equipment: a 3 litre pressure cooker, a heavy kadhai or pot for the masala, and a small tadka pan.

Steps

  1. 1. Wash the rajma 3 times and soak it 12 hours in 4 cups of water. It doubles in size. Throw the soaking water away and rinse.
  2. 2. Cooker: beans, 3 cups fresh water, ½ tsp salt. First whistle on high, then low flame 20 to 25 minutes. Let the pressure drop on its own, then crush a few beans between your fingers.
  3. 3. Heat 2 tbsp ghee on medium. Cumin and hing, then the onion: 12 to 15 minutes, stirring, to deep golden brown.
  4. 4. Ginger-garlic paste and chillies, 1 minute. Turmeric, chilli, and coriander powder with 2 tbsp water, 30 seconds. Tomato purée, 8 to 10 minutes, until the ghee shows at the sides.
  5. 5. Rajma in with 1 to 1½ cups of its cooking water and the rest of the salt. Mash a ladle of beans against the side. Simmer on low 15 to 20 minutes.
  6. 6. Garam masala, crushed kasuri methi, and coriander. Taste for salt.
  7. 7. Tadka: 1 tbsp ghee in a small pan, garlic until golden, off the flame, ½ tsp Kashmiri chilli. Pour over the rajma and cover for 2 minutes.

One bowl, a quarter of the pot: about 290 kcal, 12 g protein, 10.3 g fat (6.1 g saturated), 39 g carbohydrate, 9.4 g fibre, and 3.5 mg iron, worked out from USDA FoodData Central for raw red kidney beans, ghee, onion, and tomato. Spices, garlic, and salt add very little and are not counted. With a plate of rice made from 75 g of raw basmati, the rajma chawal plate comes to about 560 kcal.

Be careful with the tadka. Ghee is only ready once every drop of water in the makkhan has boiled away, so hot ghee sits far above the heat of boiling rajma, and when it meets the wet gravy it spits hard. Take the pan off the flame, pour from low down close to the pot, and put the lid on straight away. That lid also holds the garlic smell in. If a splash does catch you, what to do is on ghee and burns. The same garlic and ghee finish is the heart of our ghee dal tadka.

How long to soak rajma, and how many whistles?

Soak rajma for 12 hours, then give it one whistle on high and 20 to 35 minutes on a low flame, depending on the bean. Counting whistles is less reliable than timing the low flame, because every cooker whistles at a different pace; on most 3 litre cookers, 20 to 25 minutes is about 5 to 6 whistles. The only test that counts is your fingers: every bean should crush with no white, chalky centre.

Rajma

Looks

Cooker, after a 12 hour soak

In the pot

Chitra rajma

Light brown, red speckles

First whistle on high, then low flame 20 to 25 minutes

Soft skin, creamy inside. Breaks down a little into the gravy, which is what thickens Punjabi rajma.

Jammu or Bhaderwah rajma

Small, dark red

First whistle on high, then low flame 25 to 30 minutes

Sweeter and holds its shape. The gravy stays thinner, so mash a few more beans.

Large dark red rajma

Big, deep maroon, glossy

First whistle on high, then low flame 30 to 35 minutes

Thick skin. Stays whole and firm, and the gravy stays apart from the beans.

Old rajma (a year or more in the tin)

Wrinkled, dull, harder to bite

Add 10 minutes and check again

Old beans may never turn fully soft. Buy from a shop that sells a lot of it.

Canned rajma

Already cooked

No soak, no cooker. Rinse and add at step 4

Safe as it comes. Simmer 10 minutes in the masala so it takes the taste.

Chitra rajma is the easy pick for this dish because it softens into the gravy. Jammu rajma is sweeter and firmer, and worth the extra minutes if you like whole beans. If you forget to soak, do not pressure cook dry beans for longer and hope; cook them another day, or use canned rajma for tonight. Leave out baking soda. It softens the skins but makes the beans taste soapy and turns the gravy dull.

Is undercooked rajma dangerous?

Yes. Raw and undercooked red kidney beans contain a natural toxin called phytohaemagglutinin, and Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety notes that as few as four or five raw beans can cause symptoms: strong nausea and vomiting within 1 to 3 hours, then diarrhoea. Soaking alone does not remove it. Cooking the beans soft at full boiling heat does.

The same 2023 advice is to soak the beans for at least 12 hours and boil them hard for at least 10 minutes, and never to cook them only at a low heat, as in a slow cooker. A pressure cooker gets far hotter than boiling, so the cooker step in this recipe covers it, as long as the beans come out fully soft. Canned rajma has already been heat treated and is safe straight from the can. Slow cooking is also why we put the rajma through the cooker first in our dal makhani recipe.

How much ghee in rajma, and how many calories a bowl?

Three tablespoons for a pot of four: two to fry the onion-tomato masala and one for the garlic tadka on top. That works out to about 2¼ teaspoons of ghee a bowl and 287 kcal. The masala needs enough fat to brown 300 g of onion without burning; the tadka is the part you smell when the bowl reaches the table, so if you cut, cut from the masala.

ICMR-NIN's 2024 dietary guidelines suggest limiting ghee or butter to 1 to 2 teaspoons a day, inside about 27 to 30 g of all visible fat, oil and ghee together, on a 2,000 kcal diet. A bowl of this rajma is a little over that ghee line by itself, so on a rajma day we skip the spoon of ghee on the roti, or make the light pot below.

Pot of 4

Ghee in the pot

Ghee a bowl

kcal

Sat. fat

How it turns out

Light

In the pot: 1 tbsp masala + 1 tbsp tadka (26 g)

A bowl: 1½ tsp

259 kcal

Saturated fat 4.1 g

The onion browns slower in less ghee; add a splash of water if it catches. The tadka still carries the smell.

This recipe

In the pot: 2 tbsp masala + 1 tbsp tadka (38 g)

A bowl: 2¼ tsp

287 kcal

Saturated fat 6.1 g

The masala fries properly and the ghee shows at the edges, the way rajma looks at home.

Dhaba-rich

In the pot: 3 tbsp masala + 2 tbsp tadka (64 g)

A bowl: 3¾ tsp

343 kcal

Saturated fat 10 g

A ghee layer on top. For a Sunday or guests, not a weekday.

Per bowl, a quarter of the pot, without rice. USDA FoodData Central: kidney beans 173744, ghee 173412 (1 tbsp = 12.8 g), onion 170000, tomato 170457. Daily line: ICMR-NIN Dietary Guidelines for Indians 2024. Checked 28 September 2026.

The ghee is not where most of the plate's calories come from; the rice heap is. Rajma chawal is the kind of cereal and pulse pairing ICMR-NIN recommends for better protein, and its guidelines put the ratio at about 3 parts cereal to 1 part pulse by raw weight across the day. So the rice is meant to be the bigger share, just not a mountain. If you watch your weight or blood sugar, keep to one plate of rice, add a salad and curd, and read can diabetics eat ghee for the ghee side. The whole day's budget is on how much ghee per day. If a doctor has given you a fat limit, their number comes first.

Measure the ghee melted. The ghee we make cools grainy in the jar and sets firm in winter, so a heaped spoon from a cold jar holds far more than a level tablespoon. Why it sets that way is on why ghee is grainy. At our live prices, a tablespoon of our cow ghee costs about ₹36 and of our buffalo ghee about ₹30, so the ghee in this pot comes to ₹90 to ₹108, or ₹22 to ₹27 a bowl.

Cow or buffalo ghee for rajma?

Buffalo ghee for the masala if you want the rich, heavy dhaba feel: it is fuller in taste and whiter, and it fries onion well. Cow ghee for the garlic tadka, where its lighter toasted-milk smell sits on top of the spices; in the monsoon, when green fodder makes our cow ghee more yellow, it also gives the top of the bowl more colour. One jar of either does the whole pot fine. The two are compared side by side on cow vs buffalo ghee.

Why is my rajma watery, hard, or bland?

Watery rajma had too much bean water and too few beans mashed; hard rajma was old, under-soaked, or met tomato before it was soft; bland rajma had an onion that never browned. More ghee fixes none of these. Find what you see below.

Watery gravy

Too much cooking water went in, no beans were mashed, or the simmer was too short.

Fix: Mash another ladle of beans against the side and simmer with the lid off for 10 minutes. Next time add the bean water a little at a time.

Beans still hard or chalky

Short soak, old beans, or tomato and salt went in before the beans were soft.

Fix: Pull the beans out, pressure cook them 10 minutes more in fresh water, then return them. Never serve rajma with a chalky centre.

Beans split and mushy

Too long on high flame in the cooker, or chitra rajma cooked like the large red kind.

Fix: Use the time for your bean in the table. It still tastes right; call it a thick rajma and serve it with rice.

Flat, bland taste

Onion only turned soft, not brown, or the spices went into cool ghee.

Fix: Brown the onion to deep golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Taste for salt after the simmer; beans soak up a lot. Finish with the garlic tadka.

Sour or raw tomato taste

The tomato was not cooked down before the beans went in.

Fix: Cook the purée until the ghee leaves the sides, 8 to 10 minutes. If it is sour now, simmer 5 minutes more with a pinch of sugar.

Bitter masala

Onion or garlic burnt, or the chilli powder hit very hot ghee.

Fix: Add chilli powder with a spoon of water. If the base tastes burnt, start the masala again; no amount of simmering hides it.

Rajma gets its body from the beans, not from cream or cashew paste. That is the main difference from a restaurant makhani gravy, and why the mash-a-ladle step matters more than any spice. For jeera rice to go with it, see our jeera pulao or the plain ghee rice recipe; for roti, our ghee roti.

How long does rajma keep in the fridge?

Two days in the fridge, or freeze it. The UK Food Standards Agency advises getting cooked food into the fridge within one to two hours, eating leftovers within 48 hours, and freezing anything you will not eat by then. Rajma freezes well in flat boxes; thaw it in the fridge overnight.

Rajma thickens a lot overnight as the beans drink the gravy. Add 3 to 4 tablespoons of water per bowl and heat it until it bubbles all through, stirring from the base. Heat only what you will eat: the same agency says food frozen after cooking should be reheated only once. A fresh teaspoon of ghee with a little cumin on the reheated bowl brings back the smell, but it adds to the day's ghee, so skip it on a light day.

Rajma masala recipe card to keep by the stove

Screenshot it the night you put the beans to soak.

  • 1. For 4: 1 cup (185 g) chitra rajma, 3 tbsp ghee, 2 large onions, 3 medium tomatoes, 1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste, spices, 4 garlic cloves for the tadka.
  • 2. Wash the rajma and soak 12 hours in 4 cups of water. Throw the soaking water away and rinse.
  • 3. Cooker: rajma, 3 cups fresh water, ½ tsp salt. First whistle on high, low flame 20 to 25 minutes, let the pressure drop on its own. Every bean must crush with no chalky centre.
  • 4. Masala: 2 tbsp ghee, cumin and hing, onion 12 to 15 minutes to deep golden. Ginger-garlic and chillies 1 minute. Powders with a splash of water 30 seconds. Tomato 8 to 10 minutes until the ghee leaves the sides.
  • 5. Add the rajma and 1 to 1½ cups of its water. Mash a ladle of beans against the side. Simmer 15 to 20 minutes on low.
  • 6. Garam masala, kasuri methi, coriander. Taste for salt.
  • 7. Tadka: 1 tbsp ghee, garlic slivers until golden, off the flame, ½ tsp Kashmiri chilli. Pour over from low down and cover.
  • 8. About 290 kcal and 2¼ tsp ghee a bowl. Fridge within 2 hours, eat within 2 days, or freeze.

Which ghee for rajma?

The last tablespoon goes on raw, straight over the bowl, so a stale or flat ghee shows there first. Pick a plain ghee with nothing added that smells of toasted milk when it melts. The home checks are on how to identify pure ghee, and our ranking of buffalo ghee on sale is best buffalo ghee in India.

For rajma we would fry the masala in our Jafarabadi buffalo ghee and pour the tadka from our A2 Gir cow ghee. Both come from grass-fed village animals near the Gir forest in Gir Somnath; the milk is set to curd overnight, churned, and the makkhan cooked in a matki on a wood chulha. The jar is made after you order, a video of it being cooked and packed comes on WhatsApp, and Varsha tastes every batch before it goes in a jar. We test every month against the FSSAI limits; the steps are on how we make ghee.

The garlic tadka on top

A rich dhaba-style masala

Each order is cooked after you place it, and the packing video is of that batch. Past order videos are on the shop.

FAQ

Rajma kaise banaye?

1 cup rajma ko 12 ghante bhigo do, paani phenk do. Cooker mein 3 cup naya paani aur thoda namak daalkar pehli seeti tez aanch par, phir dheemi aanch par 20 se 25 minute. 2 chammach ghee mein jeera, pyaaz gehra sunehra hone tak, adrak-lahsun, masale aur tamatar tab tak bhuno jab tak ghee kinare na chhod de. Rajma aur uska paani daalo, thode daane masal kar 15 minute pakao, upar lahsun ka ghee tadka.

Can I make rajma without onion and garlic?

Yes. Leave out the onion, ginger-garlic paste, and garlic tadka, and fry 1 tsp cumin, a good pinch of hing, and 1 tbsp grated ginger in the ghee instead. Use 4 tomatoes in place of 3, and cook them down longer, 12 to 15 minutes, since there is no onion to give body. Mash a few more beans to thicken it, and finish with a cumin and Kashmiri chilli tadka in ghee.

Can I cook rajma in an Instant Pot or electric pressure cooker?

Yes. Soak the rajma for 12 hours as usual. Make the masala on saute mode in 2 tablespoons of ghee, add the drained beans and 2½ cups of water, and cook on high pressure for 30 to 35 minutes with a natural release. Check that every bean crushes easily. Mash a ladle of beans and simmer on saute for 5 to 10 minutes to thicken, then pour the garlic tadka on top.

Why does rajma cause gas, and how can I make it easier to digest?

Rajma is rich in fibre and in sugars the gut cannot fully break down, and bacteria ferment them, which makes gas. Throwing away the soaking water, rinsing, and cooking the beans until fully soft all help. Hing and ginger are the traditional additions. If beans bother you, start with half a bowl, eat it with rice, and have rajma at lunch rather than late at night.

Is rajma chawal healthy?

It is a good everyday meal: a bowl of this rajma gives about 12 g of protein and 9 g of fibre, and rice with a pulse is the kind of pairing ICMR-NIN recommends for better protein. The catch is the size of the rice heap and the ghee. Keep the rice to one plate, add salad or curd, and use the light ghee level if you eat rajma often.

What is the difference between rajma and dal makhani?

Rajma is kidney beans alone in an onion-tomato masala, cooked in about 45 minutes after the soak, with ghee and no cream. Dal makhani is mostly whole black urad with a small handful of rajma, simmered for an hour or more and finished with butter and cream, so it is richer and heavier. Rajma goes with rice; dal makhani usually with naan or jeera rice.

Sources

  1. Beans, kidney, red, mature seeds, raw (FDC ID 173744), SR Legacy, USDA FoodData Central. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  2. Butter oil, anhydrous (FDC ID 173412), SR Legacy, USDA FoodData Central. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  3. Onions, raw (FDC ID 170000), SR Legacy, USDA FoodData Central. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  4. Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, year round average (FDC ID 170457), SR Legacy, USDA FoodData Central. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  5. Rice, white, long-grain, regular, raw, unenriched (FDC ID 169756), SR Legacy, USDA FoodData Central. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  6. Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024 (Guideline 7, visible fats; Guideline 8, cereal and pulse protein), ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  7. Phytohaemagglutinin Poisoning (Food Safety Focus, November 2023), Centre for Food Safety, Hong Kong. Checked 28 Sep 2026.
  8. How to chill, freeze and defrost food safely, Food Standards Agency (UK). Checked 28 Sep 2026.

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