Braised White Beans with Sage

Put the beans in a large bowl with the 2 litres of cold soaking water and the 10g of fine salt.

Leave them at room temperature for 8-12 hours.

Salt the soaking water rather than avoiding it. Sodium displaces some of the calcium and magnesium holding the skins rigid, so the skins soften as the beans swell, and the old warning that salt keeps beans hard has it backwards.

Check one by splitting it. A soaked bean is the same colour right through, with no chalky core at the centre.

Drain the beans and rinse them.

Put them in a heavy pan with the 1.5 litres of fresh cold water, which should cover them by about 4cm.

Add the garlic cloves, sage leaves, bay leaves, lemon peel and 3 tbsp of the olive oil.

Bring the pan slowly up to a simmer over medium-low heat, skimming off any foam that gathers.

Turn the heat down until a bubble breaks the surface every second or two, and hold it there for the whole cook.

Never let it boil properly. A rolling boil knocks the beans against one another and the skins come away in sheets, leaving a pan of loose skins and broken halves in cloudy water.

Cook partly covered for 60-90 minutes, topping up with hot water whenever the beans come within a centimetre of the surface. Any bean left sitting in the air goes leathery and stops softening.

Stir in the 6g of cooking salt after 40 minutes.

Start tasting at 50 minutes, and taste five beans rather than one. Done beans are creamy right through with no chalk at the centre, and the skin gives at the same moment the flesh does.

Give up rather than boil harder if they are still hard after two hours. Dried beans harden with age, and a bag that has sat in the cupboard for three years will not soften whatever you do to it.

Take the pan off the heat and fish out the bay leaves and the lemon peel.

Squeeze the soft garlic out of its skins into the pan and stir it through, discarding the skins.

Stir in the remaining olive oil and the ground peppercorns.

Stand the pan for 15 minutes. The starch that has come out of the beans thickens the liquid as it cools, into something between a broth and a sauce, which is the reason for cooking them from dried rather than opening a tin.

Serve in shallow bowls with plenty of the liquor, a thread more olive oil and a pinch of flaky salt.

Cool any leftovers within two hours and keep them in their liquid in the fridge for up to four days.