I’m going to focus on some healthier and more nutritionally oriented food today because I feel like it’s gotten better up and you can make really, really great healthy nutritious food that you don’t feel like you’re eating health food or diet food. It’s springtime, I’m thinking spring. I want to really taste the flavors of spring. One of the first things that pops in my head for New York State, New Jersey is peas, is fresh peas.
So, we’re going to start and make a chilled pea soup to get everybody ready for the spring time and the summer. So where we want to start with that is we want to start with the shallot. One of the things about using a shallot is that it's got a more layers of flavor. You treat it just like an onion. I’m going to cut it in half and I’m going to mince it up just like I would in onion. It is in the onion family, but it's a softer flavor.
We’re going to start with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. Again, one of the ways we’ve chosen to make this a little bit more nutritional is to substitute olive oil for butter. So we’re going to take our shallot. What we’re going to do is we’re going to do a technique called sweating. And to sweat, what we’re going to do is we’re going to add our shallots and our oil to our cold sauce pot.
We take a little bit of the garlic and we’re going to add some of the garlic in here, and then we’re going to sweat this. You can see how quickly how may pan got hot. Since they’re cut up so small I don’t have to worry about cooking them very long.
Now I’m going to take my fresh peas. These are fresh English peas from the Greenmarket. If you don’t have them, you use frozen peas. I wouldn’t use canned peas because those are already partially cooked. So we’re going to toss them in the olive oil, the shallots and the garlic so they get all of that delicious flavor.
To that, what I’m going to do is I’m going to add some chicken stock. If you’re a vegetarian you can easily add vegetable stock. If you’re buying it from the grocery store, just buy a little bit of chicken broth. Again, the biggest thing to remember is to find something that’s low sodium. I’m going to add a pinch of salt and I’m going to add a pinch of pepper.
This has come up to its first boil. Once it comes to a first boil, we’re going to turn it off. What I’m doing now is I’m taking my solids from my soup and then putting them into my blender. I’m going to add just enough liquid to come to the top of my peas. As soon as I’ve gotten the liquid to the top of my peas, I stop. And I want to take my blender on a low speed and puree this. And you can see the way it's moving. I want it to be a nice soup consistency. If it's too thick, I can add a little more stock to it, if it's not thick enough, then I can add more peas to it. We’re going to let that puree for one minute. While that’s pureeing, what I’m going to do is I’m going to set up an ice bath, because to keep this vibrant green color, I need to chill it as fast as possible. So what I’ve done is I’ve set up a small—these are referred to as being marred, but any metal cup will do. A strainer and it’s set up on ice.
I’m going to take my hot soup. And I’m putting it through my strainer. Do you have to do this? No. You are welcome to serve the soup without straining, and that some people feel that they don’t want to strain out the skins from the peas because that does drop a little bit of the nutritional value, some of the fiber that you get from the skins. This is really a restaurant technique to make it—have a little nicer mouth feel.
It’s on ice. I’m going to stir it. For our spring soup, what we want to do for garnish is we want to make a little salad of peas. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make our own peas salad out of snow peas, because snow peas are pretty easy to find. We’re going to make a very thin slice of these snow peas and so that we can make a nice little salad that will go into our soup. So what we’re going to do with these is we’re going to take our snow peas, I’m going to put them in a bowl, I’ve got a little extra over there. Our snow peas, we’re going to add a little pinch of salt, little pinch of pepper. We’re going to add a little bit of fresh squeeze lemon juice and again back with the extra virgin olive oil. And we’re going to make a nice little salad out of this. And what this is going to do is it’s going to give me some crisp acid to serve against the creaminess of my soup, it’s going to give me something crunchy in my soup when I eat it.
When you’re tasting the soup, you’re getting the creamy richness of the peas, you’re getting the sweetness. This is what you get from the young English peas, you get sweetness and there’s no sugar in here, it’s amazing.
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