The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
This week... frozen peas
They’re a freezer staple, but which are worth shelling out on? Xanthe Clay finds out
Thank goodness for frozen peas. With vegetable shortages likely to drag on, this freezer staple is the ideal fallback.
There was a time when peas were pretty much the only bearable frozen veg in the supermarket, nestled between frozen concentrated orange juice and institutional “mixed vegetables”. These days edamame beans (great in noodle salads), spinach and grilled peppers for shakshuka, and even mixed mushrooms for risotto all merit space in my over-stuffed freezer.
Nutritionally these match their fresh equivalents, possibly even rating better than veg that’s been languishing in the salad drawer for days. “Freezing is nature’s pause button,” says Stephen Francis of growers cooperative Fen Peas. “A freshly cut cauliflower has probably got a two- to three-day journey to get to the shelf. Peas are frozen within 150 minutes,” he explains.
It’s nutrition worth having. As well as the fragile, fast-degrading antioxidants like vitamin C, peas are high in iron and insoluble fibre and contain a decent amount of protein – more than most vegetables, except beans, and like beans they are a complete protein.
Britain is 90 per cent self-sufficient in peas, growing 160,000 tonnes a year, mostly on the fertile east coast between Suffolk and Dundee. They grow in a tangle of low, self-supporting vines and are harvested in an intense 10 weeks from June to August, when huge “pea viners” – specialist combine harvesters – comb the fields, stripping the pods from the plant, bursting them open and separating the peas. At the processing plant they are assessed with phenomenal rigour, including testing on a Tenderometer, a vice-like contraption that checks how much pressure it takes to squish them, how much water they contain and how juicy they are. Too many loose skins merits a downgrade, as does poor colour: yellowing peas are removed by a targeted puff of air. Blanching follows, and individual freezing in a “freezing tunnel”, so they don’t clump together.
Peas are graded as AA, A, B, C and D, with AA and A grade heading for bagging and selling frozen in premium and standard ranges, and B going into economy-range bags. Other grades have a place in processing – that cottage pie with peas in the mince will feature a lower grade pea, robust enough to stand up to long cooking.
There are two kinds of pea: petits pois and ordinary garden. The two are separate cultivars, although occasionally smaller garden peas will be sold as petits pois. There’s no official size criteria, but most of the petits pois I tried were barely bigger than peppercorns, with the exception being the noticeably larger Birds Eye ones.
Petits pois are the caviar of peas: smaller, and with a distinct “popping” texture to the tiny spheres. They fetch a premium price, as unsurprisingly they have a lower yield per field. You should get tender skins and sweet flavour, with no trace of a mealy texture, for your money.
We are often told that frozen peas taste better than fresh. The truth is more nuanced than that. Frozen peas have a better flavour than peas that have been allowed to swell in the pod for too long, or have been waiting around too long after harvesting (fresh peas degrade quickly after picking and podding, as their sugars turn to starch). That said, good fresh peas have a particular leafy, herbaceous quality that seems to be lost in the processing. So frozen peas by and large taste good, but are different to fresh, the subtlety of flavour overwhelmed by the sweetness that processors value above all else.
Tasting my way through 15 different bags of frozen peas, one did match that fresh flavour – complex, rather than a sledgehammer of sweetness. So maybe the issue is one of variety not of processing. There’s another reason that you can usually tell the difference between fresh and frozen peas. It’s the even size. “Like two peas in a pod”, goes the saying but “like two peas in a freezer bag” would be truer. If you have popped open a fresh pod of peas you’ll know that very often they aren’t that similar at all, in size at least.
Perhaps that is why I have a soft spot for the cheapest bags of peas, like Morrisons Naturally Wonky Peas which range from tiny oval pea-lets, the kind that lurk at either end of the pod, right up to centimetre-wide whoppers. They are a hodgepodge of different sizes and degrees of tenderness. The lower sweetness levels make them better for soup, as standard peas can be cloyingly sweet when pureed. There’s also something reassuringly real about this far-from-consistent rattlebag, and it’s the best option if you’re trying to pass off frozen as fresh. Would I? Laced with fresh mint and chives – you bet.