Hello, this is Chef John from Foodwishes.com with ham and split peas soup. Yes, it’s that time of year, time for some delicious party soups and this one could not be easier. First, we’re going to start with some aromatic vegetables. I got my sliced garlic. I got some celery and I got some onion diced. Alright, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a couple table spoons of butter in my soup pot and we’re going to slowly sweat the vegetables. That’s means medium low heat, you're going to put a little pinch of salt in there and you’re just going to slowly sweat them. You don’t want to brown them. You don’t want to fry them. You just want to sweat them. They should look like one of those bankers testifying in front of congress. Then we’re going to take a pound of country ham. And if you want, you're going to take some of that excess fat out there and I've always wondered how come there is no city ham?
I want to taste city ham and I'm just going to dice that up and that really would make split peas in my opinion. You could make vegetarian split peas if you want. Alright, after the vegetables are slight soften and sweaty, we’re going to add our ham and we’re going to throw a bay leaf in there, some salt, some pepper and we’re just going to leave that on medium low and let that cook for about five minutes. And then I'm going to go through my split peas here, this is one pound bag of split peas. And sometimes there are little rocks in them. So just kind of sprinkle it through your fingers like this and if there is any little pebbles, you’ll see I mean, you can pick them up. At one pound package is about three cups. All right, so veggies and the ham have been sautéing about five minutes. Alright, I'm going to throw in my split peas. Alright, I'm going to put in a quarter of chicken stock, and I'm also going to throw in two and a half cups of water.
Alright now, you want to bring this to a simmer and you just want to simmer it on low until it’s done. It’s going to take about an hour and 15 minutes, and it goes through several stages. First, it just looks like this. After about 40 minutes or so, the split peas start to kind of soak up a little bit of that hot liquid but you'll still see it’s kind of split peas and then this kind of almost like a clear liquid. Another 45 minutes later it has turned into what you would recognize as split peas. Now you want to taste this because the ham varies as far as how salty it is, so that’s why I didn’t put a lot of salt in the beginning just a pinch. Alright, I will lie that into my bowl, you know that part.
And I'm going to garnish this with just a little black pepper that’s all it needs. Now, if you want and this shot right here is in memory of my father, he would crumble crackers on every soup he ever ate. There was such thing as a cracker soup, he would have put cracker on them. Anyway, this is so delicious that sweet saddle smokiness of the ham that little bit of saltiness with the delicious sweet peas. One of the great, great, great soups in the world, so give that a try, it doesn’t have to be raining, you make soup anytime. Anyway, go to the site check out the amounts and as always enjoy.
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