How to Freeze Purple Hull Peas

Field peas of different varieties are a staple of a southern kitchen, and my personal favorite, as well as most of my family, are purple hull peas.  Mississippi pink eye purple hulls, to be exact.  (You can see pictures of some of them growing on my other blog on the on the post I did last week about my parent's garden.)

It's wonderful to eat fresh vegetables in season, especially home-grown, but part of the fun of having a garden is to be able to "put up" some to eat later.  Preserving food is, to me, both an art and a science, and no one wants to waste time or money "putting up" food that doesn't taste good, or heaven forbid, goes bad. Canning, freezing, drying, pickling and preserving, there are a myriad of ways to do it, and some foods just take better (and taste better) if they're done a certain way, and purple hull peas, in my opinion, are one of them, and the way that they taste best is frozen--IF--and that's a big "if"--they're done the right way!

And what is the "right" way of freezing purple hull peas?  I'm about to show you the secret.

And what is the secret? 

Blanching and shocking.

And I'm about to show you how!

This is a dishpan full of peas, peas, glorious peas.  I love running my hands through a pan full of freshly shelled peas. I don't even know how to tell you how they feel, cool and just slightly moist to the touch; I feel like Midas counting my gold when I play with peas. (Yes, my momma told me not to play with my food, but this is fun!).

This dishpan full was from about a bushel and half of unshelled peas, or about 13 1/2 pounds (General speaking, purple hulls weigh out at 9 pounds a bushel, unshelled.)

Although my parents wash the peas in the shell twice before they go through the sheller, the first step is always to wash them twice again. 





My mom has her techniques down to a routine--fill one dishpan with water, then swish around and lift them into a second pan...

...she gets a rhythm going, of swish and plop...

And when she finishes the first washing...

...she adds water and does it all over again...

....to still another dishpan.

Swishing and plopping (they're my own technical terms)...

...until we have another dishpan full of lovely washed peas.  (not fun to handle after they're wet)

Then she drains the water from the dishpans....

...and this is secret number one--try to one of these little strainers, or you will fill you drain up with all of the little goopy things that come off the inside of the shells. 

(And you will need your sink to be fully functional, this is a sink-intensive task)

Secret number two--use a blanching pot, which is large (think soup-size)  pot with an insert like the one above, which makes putting the peas or other vegetables in and out of the boiling water much easier. 

 (You don't have to have one of these, but trust me, it's much easier if you do.)

Secret number three--don't fill the pot full, you need to leave room for the water to boil, with vegetables in it, without overflowing.   

Secret number four--it's much easier if you have two blanching pots, or at least two inserts, so you can speed up the blanching time by having one in the pot, and one ready to go when the first one gets ready.

Secret number five--don't over fill the blanching pot insert (see secret number three)

Secret number five--while you're waiting for the water to boil, pre-mark your freezer bags with the date so that next year you'll know how long things have been in your freezer.  If you freeze mystery food, you may want to include what's being frozen, but peas are pretty much self-evident.  (My parents use a code instead of the date.  They're mysterious like that.)

Secret number six--use a good quality freezer bag, not a storage bag, to put things into the freezer.  Don't waste your time and money, not to mention your good produce, by using cheap bags that aren't made for long-term storage.

And now--step one--once the water comes to a boil, put the peas (or whatever vegetable you're putting up) into the water, and bring back to a boil.  Stir a little to make sure the boiling water is coming into contact with all of the food being blanched. 

Guess what?  You're blanching!

Skim off the foam and stuff that floats to the top.

And now for the tricky part--each different vegetable blanches differently.  Small things, like peas, take less time than something big, like and ear of corn. 

We did these about 3-4 minutes after the water was boiling again.  My mother is magic, she just knows when it's been long enough.

(Actually, she's done this so long, she goes by the look of the peas when they're about done.)

Now you're ready to shock the peas---no, no, you don't have to tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, you just have to cool them off rapidly, to stop the cooking process.  This is done with water and a lot of ice.

And on to secret number seven--it takes a lot of ice.  A lot.  Your ice maker cubed ice is not enough.  Some people buy bags of ice, but don't waste your money--little pieces of ice melt too fast, you need big ice, so make ice ahead of time in recycled plastic bowls.  (Don't use your good tupperware, most of them will spit after they've been frozen a few times--once these split, we send them to plastic heaven and get more out of our saved-all-year-for-this-purpose-stash)

Fill one side of the sink with water, and throw in some cool-whip-bowl ice.

Take the insert and rinse it with cool water from the tap, swishing around to cool off the pot...

(rinsing it first in tap water cools off the pot and keeps it from melting the ice too fast)

Put it over in the ice water side and continue to rinse until the vegetables are cool.

Guess what? 

You're shocking!

(Not, you are shocking (noun) as in you are a shocking person--you are shocking (verb), as in you are blanching and shocking to put vegetables into the freezer!)

Next step--bag them up! 

A hundred years ago when all of us kids were at home, we used to make what we called "fat quarts"--as much as we could fit in the bad and it close properly--now mom and dad make "skinny quarts" so they don't have to eat peas for a week at a time--although peas are even better when they're left over and heated up, but even the best thing gets old after a while.

We make a game of it--when the peas are still in the dishpan, we all take turns guessing how many bags we'll end up with--and this time, we had 11 quarts (some fat, some skinny) which I got to take home to my house and put in my freezer! (One last secret--spread the bags out in your freezer in a single layer, if possible, until they're well frozen, and then stack them, that way you know everything is frozen in a timely manner)

Note: I know of some people who cook their peas completely before freezing or canning, and that works, but you miss that just-cooked-fresh-from-the-garden taste that you get from doing it this way.  I've also heard of people who just shell their peas and freeze them in big bags without the whole blanching and shocking process, but we don't like the way they taste or keep that way.


If you want to see the process I use to cook peas that have been frozen like this, you can my Pass the Peas, Please post.

So now you know the Secrets of this Southern Kitchen when it comes to "putting up" peas--and many thanks to my mom and dad for letting me take picture of the process. (My mother has threatened me if I show her face--one of these days I'm going to sneak one in!) This was just the first picking, and a small one at that--my folks have already put up over 70 quarts of green beans alone, there's no telling how many quarts of peas will come from their garden this year. So needless to say, I trust their experience and their expertise.


Until next time, good cooking, and good eating!

This post is linked to:

See Ya in the Gumbo at Ms enPlace
Meatless Monday at My Sweet and Savory
Make Your Home Sing Monday at Mom's the Word
Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch
Tuesday Garden Party at An Oregon Cottage
Teach Me Tuesday at Growing Home Blog
Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family
Wow us Wednesday at Family Home and Life
Homemaking Party at Hope in Every Season

Pass the Peas, Please

A couple of months ago I posted about my learning to eat and then to cook asparagus, a vegetable that I was not familiar with growing up. Today's post is about a vegetable that this Southern girl grew up with; one that that my parents and grandparents and probably even their parents' parents grew and cooked and ate, namely, the purple hull pea.

These may look like a green version of black-eyed peas, and while I'm sure they're related, fresh purple hull peas, to me, taste nothing like black eyes. For one thing, black-eyes are mostly eaten dried, then soaked and cooked, while purple hull peas are eaten fresh or frozen from fresh, not dried.

My family grows what's called pink-eye purple hulls. My dad's favorite variety, the Mississippi Pink-Eye, is one that hasn't been available commercially for a couple of years, so he's compromised by growing a different variety of pink-eyed purple hulls, known, I think, by the name "Top-pick".

I have memories in childhood of getting up in the dark and riding in my Papa's pick-up truck while my mom and Nanny (grandmother) rode in the car, to a farm where you paid a little bit of nothing to pick your own peas. (In later years I remember them growing their own, so I'm not sure why we went somepalce else that year to pick peas.) It was wet, nasty work--you had to pick early, when the dew was still on the ground, before it got too hot. It was fun for about the first five or ten minutes, but once the sun came up, it got old fast. (Where were the child-labor laws when we needed them??)

Once we had picked our bushel baskets full, we took them home and then the fun part begun--shelling all those peas by hand. I can remember shelling till my fingers got sore--and with purple-hulls, they get black and purple stained, too. Nobody could out-shell my Nanny-she loved it and was faster than anybody else I knew. In the early days, we sat outside in lawn chairs under the tree, surrounded by the bushel baskets of picked peas, dishpans full of shelled peas, and brown paper bags of pea hulls--ready for daddy or papa to throw over the fence to the cows. It was fun, really, everyone sitting around and talking and shelling peas. To this day I love running my hands through dishpans full of raw, uncooked peas, they feel so smooth and cool, I used to imagine it was treasure as I picked up handfuls and let them run through my fingers back into the dishpan. Nowadays my parents have a pea-sheller; two people can shell a bushel of peas faster than we could have even imagined back then.

I'm not sure how much help we kids really were, or if it offset the amount of whining I'm sure we did, but once the shelling was done, we were off the hook. The women of the family, though, still had hours more of blanching and shocking and bagging for the freezer before they were done--usually long after the rest of us were in bed. It was a right of passage for us girls to be allowed to help--first with the bagging, later with the actual blanching (immersing in boiling water for a few minutes) and shocking (immersing then into ice water to stop the cooking process), getting them ready for the bagging process. Zipper topped freezer bags are a wonderful invention, but there was a technique to twisting those little paper-(and later plastic) coated wire twisty ties to the top of the bags so that they held tight without slipping off!

The results, though, brought back the taste of summer every time our mom's and grandma's cooked up a pot of peas. A little bit of bacon or at least bacon grease, some salt and pepper, that was all that was needed to cook the best peas.

These days I do mine a bit different, but they still have the same great taste. Once I put my still frozen peas in the pot and add water, I add dried onion flakes, a teaspoon or two of chicken stock paste, and my favorite all purpose seasoning, Tony Chachere's (Tony Chay Chay's to my family).

Bring everything to a boil, breaking apart the peas as they thaw. Turn down to medium or medium high, and cook until the peas are done, at least 45 minutes, depending on the quantity of peas.

Note:

I've tried commercial frozen so-called "purple hull peas", and to me, they taste like black eyes. Personally, I like dry black eyes, but not fresh ones. I have yet to find a commercially frozen purple hull peas that taste like the purple hulls I know and love.

Some people freeze their purple hull peas without blanching first--I've never cooked peas done this way, but I know they take longer to cook. Conversely, some people basically cook their fresh peas almost to done before freezing, so they take a much shorter time to finish.

In my family, we put up vegetables in the freezer. There are different techniques for vegetables canned in jars; I have no experience cooking peas put up this way, so if you try canned peas, you're on your own!

What's your favorite home grown vegetable?

For more recipes and links, see Tasty Tuesday at Balancing Beauty and Bedlam, and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday at Blessed with Grace.

As always, good cooking, and good eating!