How To Cook Black Eyed Peas

What I'm going to show you is how to cook black eyed peas today. No, not those black eyed peas, these black eyed peas. You are thinking of the pop group, probably.

Now, the thing with peas or I mean, they're really beans, really, since they rope you in but the thing with these is when they're harvested, they're quite on season and they're great in lots of different countries so harvest time vary, so harvest them all out and then get them all out and then just dry them and sell them as a dried bean which you there have to reconstitute before you can cook. So, we're going to do just that. If you look at the quantities, if I just pour and cover those with water, you actually have to leave them for something around 8 to 10 hours overnight as what they normally suggest.

If you want to speed up the cooking process, you can sometimes do in 2 or 3 hours by just adding baking powder or bicarbonate soda, maybe a teaspoon. Now obviously, we don't have – it would be much of a video, isn't it? – to waste 12 hours so what I've done is I've set some earlier on yesterday. Those are now soaked and about twice the size and what I'm going to do is pass them through the colander.

Now and ordinarily, what you could do is put them in cold water and bring them up to the boil and then refresh that water but that's quite a boring video so what I'm going to do is just blanch them straight into boiling water. Cooking times vary. It can be something like 20 - 25 minutes.

You know, generally between 15 and 25 minutes as they normally say. That's going to come up to the boil and then we're going to finish this dish off when you come back. Right, now those have been simmering away for about – it's actually a bit longer – I've said some 20 minutes to half an hour but actually, the reality is bring them up to the boil on gentle simmer probably about 30 to 40 minutes, with 10 minutes on the firm boil and then another 30 minutes on the gentle simmer and I think, well, I know because I've checked them beforehand so it works but those are now beautifully cooked.

We're just going to plate these. Let me get my spoon now. On here and here you have your own singing black eyed peas and I always say this when I do videos, but you want to give the dish height and always think using something green is a good way of achieving that.

For my signature, a little bit of black pepper on there, just a little bit of olive oil, I got a feeling, there you have the black eyed peas. .