Many in their Soviet childhood ate in a kindergarten or school such a simple dish as pea puree. Someone liked it, someone didn’t, but the fact that peas contain many useful vitamins and minerals always remains. Pea puree is a very easy to prepare and tasty dish that can be used as a side dish for meat, for example, or simply as an independent dish. For adherents of vegetarianism, this is generally a godsend. If you include your imagination, you can come up with many options for how to diversify pea puree.
However, not many people know how to cook pea puree correctly so that the peas are well cooked and crumbly, tasty and tender.
Cooking pea puree does not require great culinary talent and vast experience in cooking, the main thing is to know some of the features of this product. To get started, you need to choose the right kind of pea. For your pea puree, yellow wax peas are halves. Since such peas are grown on dry soils, it incorporates a large amount of vitamins and nutrients that are necessary for the human body. You can also use brain varieties of peas (wrinkled or smooth).
How to cook pea puree?
The first rule that must be observed if you want the cooking to be quick is to fill the peas with water on the eve of the cooking. It must be soaked in water for at least eight hours. It’s better to do it this way: pour peas in the evening and leave for the night, it absorbs water and will be easier to digest. The next day, it can be easily prepared.
Drain the evening water and pour boiling water so that the water covers the peas in the pan two fingers higher. Put on a big fire, and bring to a boil. When the peas boil, you need to reduce the heat to a minimum and cook for another hour after that. At the very end, before removing, a pinch of salt should be added to the peas (if added earlier, the peas will cook longer, since the salt holds it together) to taste and a piece of butter. Some people prefer to add a little milk in mashed potatoes, but I never do that (maybe I just don’t like milk?), But you can try to do it differently, what if you like it. Then remove the pan from the heat and leave the peas under a lid at room temperature so that it is steamed and boiled. Then it will practically not need to be crushed. After half an hour, you can rub it through a sieve or crush it until a smoothie is smooth (I always compare it with baby food). If you have a blender, then there is no problem at all: fall asleep in a blender, mix, and here you have the finished pea puree - it’s tasty and healthy!
Now you know how to make pea puree for a side dish. It is suitable for any meat.
But you can make pea puree and a separate dish. To do this, you need a piece of bacon cut into thin slices and finely chopped onions. Fry all this in sunflower oil in a pan until golden brown and add to our puree. It turns out very tasty and satisfying.
There is another way, how to cook pea puree, more modern. Pressure cookers are very common now, in them dishes are prepared very quickly and retain their beneficial properties. And, if you are a happy owner of such a magical device, then it is not at all a question for you how to cook pea puree.
In this case, cooking will take you only 15 minutes and a minimum of effort. But, nevertheless, you need to remember that peas must also be soaked before cooking, so that it is crumbly and tender.
No matter how you cook this dish, which came to us from the Soviet era, pea puree remains tasty and healthy for a person at any age.