Sunday 28 June 2015

Pea & Potato Soup with Bacon – a success in spite of technical difficulties

Carole's Chatter - Pea & Potato Soup with Bacon


If you are looking for a soup that can be cooked quickly, this Pea & Potato Soup with Bacon is not for you. This is a 2 day process!

The day before

Cook your ham hock in the slow cooker by covering it with water and added a bunch of other aromatics to the water – in this case I used:

Star anise
Coriander seeds
Knob of frozen ginger
2 sticks of frozen lemongrass
2 dried red chillies
2 bay leaves
8 or so cloves
Some chilli oil
Some garlic oil
A cut up carrot
A cut up parsnip
Spring onions

I cooked this on low for about 10 hours at which stage the meat was falling off the bone.

Take the meat out and put on a plate.  Strain the liquid and keep the clear stock to form the base of your soup.

Throw out the bones and skin of the ham hock and shred the meat and keep it in the fridge for your soup.

To make the soup

Take your stock from the day before and add 2-3 potatoes cubed to it and simmer until the potatoes are just about tender.  Add a good quantity of frozen peas and cook for another 5 minutes.

At this stage my intention was to blitz the mixture smooth with a stick blender – but guess what, it made a funny noise and didn't work.  So Plan B was using a potato masher which was only partially successful.

Put the soup back on the stove and add some cream or crème fraiche and the ham hock pieces.  Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper as required.

Serve with a garnish of a few drops of chilli oil (mine was home made and eye-watering) and a swirl of cream.

A confession – in the real world the pieces of ham hock will sink to the bottom and not show at all in the photo – so I put a mason jar lid in the bottom of the plate so it held them up.  Apologies for the tricky!

7 comments:

  1. Oooooh what a clever photography trick! This sounds so comforting and warming. Potatoes and bacon are such a natural match. Bummer on the stick blender.

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  2. The stock sounds delicious (along with the peas, potatoes, and ham)! I'll have to try this - cool weekend here in Virginia, USA - 70F high during the day.

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  3. Great idea to get the ham to show up! I like the idea of the chili oil to jazz up the soup, too.

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  4. Oh boy does that sound good, and I love your ingenuity!

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  5. This does sound really worth the time, even though I'm more in the mood for cold soups with this weather we're having.

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  6. Laughing at your photography trick, but the soup sounds like it's worth the two day process!

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  7. Toofunny bout that Mason jar lid. Hey, whatever it takes to get a good photo! Love the looks of this soup. I know it's cold where you are, horrificly hot here, but we still eat soup. Year round!

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