Recipe: Split Pea Soup

Dried legumes. Wonderful things. Do you remember Y2K? How many pounds of dried beans and peas and lentils and such did you store away, just in case . . .

Well, if you've got any split green peas left, this is the way to deal with them. First, cook a ham. Feed 23 people (friends, relatives, the local fireman's fund raisers, whatever). Save the ham bone (and all the little tidbits, or big tidbits, of ham meat that didn't get eaten). Freeze them. Wait a few months. Now you're ready to make split pea soup.

here's what you'll need . . .

1 lb (one bag) dried split green peas
1 leftover ham bone
leftover ham meat (or whatever you end up scraping off the bone, if that's all you have)
1 (or 2) smallish carrots, sliced or coarsely chopped
3 - 4 medium potatoes, peeled or not, cubed
1 medium onion, chopped
6 - 12 mushrooms, thick sliced or coarsely chopped (optional if you hate mushrooms)
Tellicherry
thyme
2, 4, 6 qts. water


Here's how you do it.

Get out that old huge Dutch oven, or your 12 (20?) qt. stockpot, or the biggest other bucket you can find to cook in. This is a soup that needs to be made in quantity. This recipe will make about 8 servings (or more, if you're not using it as a main dish!)

Like it says on the bag of peas - pick them over carefully. I've only found three pebbles in 30 years of soup making, but if I had bitten into any one of those three, my Dentist's children would all have gone to Harvard.

Used to be, I’d hang a strainer into a saucepan and slowly pour a few peas from the bag into my other hand. If I didn't see any rocks or other junk, dump into the strainer. Next few peas, and so on . . .

Recently, while picking over beans for a chili, it dawned on me that a white dinner plate would make the whole job a lot easier! So, pour out some legumes of whatever ilk onto the plate and take a good look. Sticks and stones really stand out (I didn’t find any in the peas, but I found several in the beans!)



When you’ve removed any detritus, into the strainer with the clean peas or beans or . . .



Then give the strainer a swirl or five under cold running water. Drain, and toss the peas into the soup pot.



Cover the peas with water to a depth of about two inches, or a little less. Cover the pot and turn the heat to high. As soon as the peas come steamily close to a boil, turn the heat off (on an electric stove, or to barely a flame on a gas stove). You basically want to warm the peas for the next 30 minutes or so.



If you peek, you’ll usually see a white froth on the surface of the water. Not to worry. It’s just loose, surface starch, ‘blooming’ in the hot water. Eventually, the peas will reabsorb some of it and the rest will dissolve in the water.



However, there is a choice to be made here. All starchy, dried legumes have one thing in common – gas, flatulence, the musical toots, you know . . . If you’re among good friends, well, hey, charge on. If someone’s boss is coming for dinner, might I suggest . . .

Add about ½ tsp. of baking soda to the water before it comes to a boil. When the 30 minute ‘warm time’ is done, discard the water and start with fresh water to make the rest of the soup. (Do the same thing with beans or lentils and nobody will be asking you to ‘pass the Beano’ at the dinner table.)

While the peas are tenderizing, whack up the onion, carrots, and mushrooms (if you're using them).



If you've got some separate ham meat leftovers, dice them up into ¼ bite size bits. In this case, you’ll notice that my ham bone is a tad on the tiny side. No matter. Whatever you’ve got is just what you need. This was leftover from a ham steak. I put it in frozen; took it out cooked, and then trimmed the fat off. Made a great soup!



When the peas have been threatened for 30 minutes, add in the ham bone, toss in whatever you chopped up,



and fill the pot with water (well, put in at least 2 quarts; I usually go with 4, or maybe more, because I'd rather cook the soup 'down' to a good texture than have to try to thin it 'up' to a good texture). Crank up the heat, cover the pot, and wait for it to get nearly to a boil.



While waiting, wash your potatoes, and peel them if you must. Slice them in half lengthwise (so you end up with the thinnest halves, not the thickest).



Slice each half lengthwise into three strips. Slice each strip crosswise into 4 or 5 bite sized cubes.



By now (if you've got a really good stove), your soup is bubbling nicely, nearly at the boil. So cool it down again! By tossing in the potatoes. Grind a goodly layer of Tellicherry onto the top, and throw in about 1/3 tsp. of dried thyme (which you, of course, will crumble into the palm of your hand before tossing in!). Cover again. Get bubbling again. Turn down the heat to a bare simmer.



Cook for at least an hour. After 30 minutes, crack the lid to let some steam escape. After an hour, check the texture of your soup. It should be thickening, but still on the thin-ish side. If it reminds you of the LaBrea tar pits, ADD MORE WATER! If it's not sludge yet, taste it. Adjust the seasonings - is it salty enough? Peppery enough? Just that hint of thyme behind the peas? Anything else that your tongue just screams out for? Well, now's the time to add it.

And while you're at it, dredge out that ham bone. Put it on a plate and let it cool for 10 minutes or so. Then scrape every last speck of edible meat off the bone and return the meat to the soup pot. Toss the bone in the garbage.

Cook that soup until it's done - might be another 10 minutes, might be another hour. You want this to be a thick soup - it kind of sloozes out of the ladle, neither splashing, nor requiring a spoon to push it off the ladle. Sloozing, splooshing, you know . . .



Hey, serve it into bowls and dig in. Eat it with corn muffins or rye toast or oyster crackers or Pilot Crackers if you can get them, maybe a salad. Keeps for a month (if you cook it every week!), freezes for a year. Never let a good ham get away . . .!

Recipe/Technique: Classic Brown Stock

This one is such a pain in the, well, kitchen, that I only do it a few times a year. But sometimes, you just get a hankering for onion soup. And, I’m sorry but it’s true: you cannot make onion soup without home made brown stock. Oh, you can make a soup with onions, but it won’t be onion soup.

So herewith and forsooth and thusly, the classic brown stock.

Here’s what you’ll need:

bones, at least 5 lbs.
carrots
onions
celery
water
the patience of Job

Here’s how you do it.

Roast the bones. Well, get the bones first. And that can be tricky. You see, the supermarkets have seen us coming. What they used to give away, simply to avoid the cost of disposal, they have now discovered, we’ll pay for, and pay dearly. One local purveyor wants $1.50 a pound! And since they are still in business, I presume they get it.

Anyway. Shop around. Talk to small butcher shops. If any of your supermarkets are locally owned, talk to them as well. Cheap bones make stock just as good as expensive bones.

Since it takes as long to roast 2 lbs. of bones as it does to roast 5 or 10 lbs., you might as well go for the big bucket and make a few gallons of stock. Keep it in the freezer and use it over a few months until the next time you get crazed and decide to roast bones again.

I have not done this often enough to have any defensible advice on just what sort of bones you should roast. Oh, beef, for sure, but big ones, little ones, long ones, short ones, I don’t know. I’ve used them all and can’t tell the difference in the final stock. One time, I had just boned a chicken and threw those bones right in with the beef bones. Worked just fine. So I’d say, get whatever you can for as little cost as possible, and roast on . . .

Pre-heat your oven to around 400 - 425 ° F. Mine runs a little cool at those settings, so I use 425; if yours runs hot, go for 400 – you want to roast the bones, not char them.

Arrange the bones in one layer in a roasting pan and into the oven with them. Let ‘em cook for at least 1 ½ hours, two hours is ok, but no more at this point.

While the bones are in for the initial roasting, whack up some veggies. You don’t really need to trim them up, and be sure to leave the peel on the onions – it will add to the rich dark color of the final stock. Since celery has a very strong flavor, I use about 1 stalk of celery for every 4 carrots, and since my usual supply of onions are little ones, I use the same number of onions as carrots.



In this case, I gave the veggies a little rub with some olive oil and then a light sprinkle of Tellicherry and coarse salt. But you don’t have to (and in a classic kitchen, might get yelled at for doing so – this is supposed to be a ‘base’ stock, with no distinct flavor of its own.)

So, after the bones have had their first roast:



toss in the veggies and stick the pan back in the oven for another hour. When they’re ‘done,’ you can begin the long part of this process . . .



Transfer the roasted bones and veggies to your stockpot using a slotted spoon, so that any fat and drippings remain in the roasting pan.



Next, pour all the liquid in the roasting pan into a cup to cool for a while. When you can handle it, store this ‘glace de viand’ (ok, rendered beef fat; ok, ok, ok, lard) in a glass jar in the refrigerator. Add sparingly to anything in a skillet for wonderful rich flavor.



Get the roasting pan, with all its beautiful brown bits back over some heat on the stove



and pour in a cup or three of water to ‘deglaze’ the pan. Bring the liquid up to a boil, scraping all those goodies (‘gramins’ as Emeril would call them) off the bottom of the pan.



When you can ‘feel’ that the roasting pan is shiny clean under that pan sauce, add all that liquid gold to your stockpot, and then fill ‘er up with more water.



By the way, always use cold water for cooking, especially for something like this. The cold water rule has much less to do with temperature than it does with purity. Running the water until it’s cold flushes out any of the soluble ‘crud’ lining your water pipes or lurking in your hot water tank, assuring that the water you’re using is as clean and pure as it can be in your house. Of course, if your tap water smells like a swimming pool, even after you’ve run it cold, consider cooking only with bottled water. The flavor of chlorine just does not enhance the flavor of anything else . . .

Now, bring that stockpot to a barely there simmer, and let it cook for at least 8 hours; 24 hours if you possibly can. This is where all your work so far becomes kitchen magic that will last for months (unless you’re feeding an army on a strict diet of vegetable beef soup or something!)

You can use high heat and a lid for the first 30 minutes or so, to overcome all that cold water, but don’t bring this to a boil. You’re trying to entice all the flavor out of the bones and veggies, not to scare it out of them! When you get a bare simmer going, make sure the lid stays cracked so that steam can gently waft away, concentrating the flavors as they are extracted. And do remember to check every now and then to make sure all the water hasn’t evaporated!

At some point, you’re going to declare ‘done!’ and remove all the bones and veggie remains from the stockpot. I usually do this with a slotted spoon, rather than trying to dump a 4 gallon pot of hot liquid and heavy thumping bones into a colander, but then, that’s just my approach to non-scalded body parts in the kitchen. You can make your own choice.

Once solid has been separated from liquid, strain the liquid through the finest mesh strainer you have. And then clean the strainer and strain again, pouring more slowly this time. You may be surprised at how much additional stuff you get on the second, slow, strain.

Now I usually split my stock into two portions. One will go into the refrigerator to cool overnight and eventually become classic brown stock for use in the next day or two. The other portion goes back on the stove to be reduced in volume by at least half, maybe two thirds, over the same barely there heat as before. This portion will become ‘demi glace,’ and will get frozen in ice cube trays for long term storage and use over the next few months.

When the classic stock has been chilled overnight, you’ll find a large mass of fat solidified on top.



Use a thin knife or spreader or such to very gently cut around the edge of the fat and loosen it from the side of the pot. Then, slide a large spatula underneath, and using the knife or spreader to steady the top, lift the chilled fat out.



I discard this slab. I won’t tell you what to do. . . Once the demi glace is reduced, it, too, will need to cool in the refrigerator, and have the fat removed. Then you can freeze the thick, jelly-like glace.



Of course, if you have enough room in the refrigerator, you can cool the entire batch first, then remove the fat, and then separate the portions for various purposes.

When you’re done, you have a sizeable supply of wondrous basic stock to work with.