Hi, everyone. Welcome to legourmet.tv. Today, I’d find myself with a hambone. And of course, there’s only one thing to do with a hambone and that’s to make soup. So I’m going to make French Canadian Pea Soup today. This is a traditional Quebec dish using yellow peas instead of green peas. And today, I’m using three cups of split yellow peas.

And after I’ll make this recipe with a combination of split and whole yellow peas, I really kind of like that textural difference. The split peas break down and you’re left with whole peas kind of floating around in the soup but you don’t have to, because I realized that not everybody is going to be able to find whole yellow peas. So today, I’m just doing it all out of split peas.

In addition to the ham, I’m also using a half pound of bacon. I’m using three roughly chopped carrots, two diced onions and three ribs of celery. The rest of the ingredients include a couple of bay leaves, two minced garlic cloves, a little bit of vinegar that we’re going to put in right at the very end of the soup, a little bit of sugar, and some thyme. In order to lubricate the whole soup, I’m using eight cups of homemade chicken stock. You can use a store-bought chicken stock, just make sure you find a good quality one that’s low sodium, often they’re way too salty. I would release highly suggest though that you make your own chicken stock, you can also make this just with water.

It doesn’t have as much flavor is when you use a chicken stock but if you can't get chicken stock, water works just fine. So I guess the next step is, let’s go over to the stove and put it together. So we’re going to bring a heavy stock pot up to temperature. We’re going to start it off just below high. I want to get this hot enough to start frying some bacon. Now I do suggest, even if you’re only going to make soup two, three times a year that you have a good heavy stock pot, something with a good fit heavy bottom, a good conductive qualities, something that’s going to hold the heat, having the right pot for the job, it really makes everything easier.

Good, turn up the temperature. First thing that goes in is the bacon. So I’m going to turn it down just a little bit. I want the bacon to just brown. I don’t want it to get too crispy and I certainly don’t want it to burn. But the next thing we want to put in is our onion and celery mix, right into the pan. Now, you don’t want to brown this. You just want a sauce in them. You are going to need some celery now, soft, so you go ahead and add the rest of the ingredients, our hambone, the garlic, the bay leaves and the thyme, sugar, our dried yellow split peas, these are dried yellow split peas. I took them out of the bag, I washed them thoroughly and then I soaked them for a couple of hours. Ideally, you should soak them overnight but if you can't soak them at all, don’t worry, just make sure you wash them really well and you can put them right into the pot. You just have to cook the soup a little bit longer.

Next, our chicken stock and the diced carrots. So what you want to do at this point is bring it up to a boil and turn it down to a simmer, cover it and let it go for about an hour and a half for two hours. Now occasionally, you should come back and stir it and check the level of the liquid. If it needs a little more liquid, you can add some more chicken stock. If you don’t have more chicken stock, you can just add plain tap water.

So the soup is essentially done at this point. Although we need to do now is take out the hambone, we’ll cut off any meat that’s left on the bone, stick it back into the soup, and at this point that you add the vinegar. So just stir in that vinegar, I’ll put the ham back in and it’s ready to serve. There you go, my take on the French Canadian Split Peas Soup. Serve that up with a couple of homemade dinner rolls. In this case, I’m serving it with a recipe that my grandmother used to use and you can find that else where on the legourmert.tv website. I really hope you like this one. Give it a try and come on back soon.