English Peas: Harvest and Cooking

Filed under: Delicious Bite, Tagged as: delicious bite, peas

How do you cook peas? Peas are cooked in the least possible amount of water and in just the time for them to become just tender. The French cook peas in the water it takes to moisten lettuce leaves. Line a saucepan with damp greens and a few pea pods, pour in the shelled peas and cover them with moist lettuce. Steam the peas over a high heat for about 3 minutes or until they are al denté, just tender.

Be careful not to overcook peas. Boiling or long steaming will increase water absorption and cause the peas to become soggy and mushy. Both flavor and nutrients are sacrificed when peas are overcooked.

When the peas are ready, the simplest way to enjoy them is with butter, salt, and pepper.

Pea, garden pea, English pea are all the same. The pea is traditionally the first kitchen garden crop planted each year. It goes in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked. So—depending upon where you live—you are either sowing peas now or harvesting them.

If it is pea harvest time where you live, follow this advice: pick peas the instant that they are bright green and the pods begin to bulge. Split the pod open with your thumb and roll the small sweet peas into your mouth or into the bowl and immediately prepare and enjoy. Young, small, tender peas are the sweetest eating.

Peas are much like corn as soon as they mature a chemical reaction occurs that causes the peas’ sugar content to decrease rapidly. A fresh, sweet, juicy pea can rapidly become starchy and hard. The same is true if the pea is shelled and then left on the kitchen counter or in a warm place for more than a few hours.

Peas that you are going to hold onto before eating should not be shelled. Set them uncovered in the coldest part of the refrigerator until you are ready to shell them. Rinse peas before you shell them not after.

If you are leaving peas in the refrigerator overnight or a day or two, they will still be tasty, but not as sweet as if you used them within two hours of harvest. If you get peas at the market, check to see when they are harvested. Farm market peas are usually sold the day after harvest.

Two pounds of peas in the shell will give you about two cups of shelled peas. That is enough to serve three or four people.

How long will peas be available? Here in the Sonoma Valley we have already sown the second crop of peas. The first crop—called the early crop-- is coming out of the garden now. Early peas are harvested from late spring to early summer and the main crop from midsummer to early fall. Peas require 55 to 70 days from sowing to harvesting and they won’t thrive if the soil temperature climbs much above 75°F (24°C). So if your growing season is long enough and the weather doesn’t grow too hot, you might get a mid-season pea crop as well.

Posted by Stephen Albert on May 13, 2008 under: Delicious Bite , Tagged as: delicious bite, peas
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