Ingredient

Peas

Peas are the clearest case in the kitchen of frozen beating fresh. A pea starts converting its sugar to starch within hours of picking, and a bag of frozen peas was frozen within a couple of hours. Most "fresh" peas in a shop are days old.

Why frozen is better

The sugars in a pea are what make it taste of anything. Once picked, the pea keeps respiring and converts those sugars into starch quickly — noticeably within a day, substantially within three.

Commercial peas are picked and blanched and frozen within a few hours, which stops the conversion almost where it started. A pod of peas that has travelled from a farm to a warehouse to a shop to your kitchen has had days to go starchy.

So unless you are picking them yourself, or buying from a farm shop the same day, frozen peas are the better ingredient and cost a fraction as much. This is not a compromise position; it is what most professional kitchens do.

The types

Garden peas

Standard shelled peas. Frozen, the everyday choice.

Petits pois

Harvested younger and smaller. Sweeter and more tender, and worth the small premium.

Mangetout

Flat pods eaten whole, before the peas develop. Crisp, mild, and best barely cooked.

Sugar snap

Plump pods eaten whole, with developed peas inside. Sweeter and crunchier than mangetout.

Marrowfat

Peas left to mature and dry on the plant. What mushy peas are made from — a different food entirely.

Fresh in the pod

Worth buying only if very fresh. Podding is slow, and a kilo of pods gives surprisingly little.

Cooking them

• Frozen peas need almost no cooking. They are blanched before freezing, so ninety seconds in boiling water, or two minutes in a pan with butter, is enough. Longer makes them dull and grey.
• Do not defrost first. Straight from the freezer into the pan.
• Salt the water well and drain them properly.
• Finish with fat. Butter, a little cream, or good oil. Peas and butter is one of the shortest good recipes there is.
• Mint, lemon zest, spring onion and bacon are the classic additions.
• For a purée, cook briefly, blend with butter and a little of the cooking water, and pass it through a sieve.

Beyond a side dish

• Blended into a soup with stock and mint — one of the fastest good soups there is, made entirely from a freezer.
• Crushed with lemon, oil and mint onto toast, with feta or ricotta.
• Stirred into a risotto in the last two minutes.
• Added to a pasta sauce with bacon, cream and parmesan.
• In a pilaf or a fried rice, added at the very end.
• Mangetout and sugar snaps into a stir-fry in the last thirty seconds only.

Podding fresh peas, and what to do with the pods

Worth doing for a few weeks a year, and worth knowing that the pods are the better half of the haul.

1. Press the seam of the pod with a thumb until it splits, and run your thumb down the inside to release the peas.
2. Taste one raw. If they are sweet and tender, do not cook them for more than a minute; if starchy, they were picked days ago and want longer.
3. Expect roughly a third of the weight you bought to be peas. A kilo of pods gives a modest bowlful.
4. Keep the pods. Simmer them in water for twenty minutes and strain, and you have an intensely pea-flavoured stock.
5. Use that stock for the soup, the risotto or the sauce the peas are going into. It is the single best reason to buy them in the pod.
6. Very young pods can be eaten whole, sliced and cooked briefly like mangetout.
7. Pea shoots, if you can find them, are the tenderest part of the plant and want no cooking at all.

Common questions