Opinion – Recipes from Marcão: Dutch pea soup goes well with early spring rain

The Netherlands, who make their World Cup debut against Senegal on November 21, are historically known for good football and bad weather. As the beginning of spring promises to be kind of Dutch in São Paulo, with rain and cold, let’s go for a comforting soup that comes from those sides.

Soup is a way of saying it. The snert concentrates sustenance — it’s dinner like hell and you don’t even need a bun to help with lining. It’s a pea stew with a little pork and other vegetables.

The Dutch say that if the spoon doesn’t stand upright in the snert bowl, the broth is thin. The thickness you choose, it can be soup or mush — it all depends on the cooking time.

Very important: just like in Brazilian pea soup, you need to buy the right beans. You don’t use fresh or canned peas, but the dried beans that you find near the lentil in the bean shelf.

As for the pork that will add flavor, the ideal is to combine fresh and smoked meat. Bacon always goes very well, but a smoked sausage works too.

Some Dutch recipes call for cooking a fresh steak in peas. The idea is that the bone will release flavors. That’s nice; the bad thing is that steak is sirloin meat, which tends to dry out and shred.

I used boneless sirloin, which is firm and tastier than sirloin. Ribs have all three things: bone, firmness and flavor. It’s so tough that until it’s soft, everything else will fall apart in the stew.

The Dutch are not exactly famous for culinary refinement. The recipes I researched are very, very simple. They say to put everything together in the pot, pour water, turn on the fire and wait.

I like food with some toasty flavors that can only be obtained by dry — even if it dissolves later in the broth. It requires a little extra work, of sautéing the meats and vegetables before going in with the water.

Let’s do it, oh

If you want to keep it as simple as possible and follow the Dutch tradition, boil it all together (in this version, the bacon goes in a whole chunk). When the meats are cooked, reserve them, wait to cool, chop and return to the soup.

If you don’t mind piloting the stove for a few minutes, I recommend the recipe below.

snert

Yield: 2 to 3 servings

Difficulty: easy

INGREDIENTS

200 g of dried peas

100 g of chopped bacon

2 sirloin steaks (approximately 150 g)

1 large chopped onion

2 bay leaves

1 chopped carrot

1 chopped celery stalk

1 sliced ​​leek

1 potato chopped into cubes

Salt and black pepper to taste

PREPARATION

1. Leave the peas to soak in the fridge, in a covered container, for at least 4 hours.
2. Heat, on low heat, a pan that accommodates all the soup (between 1.5 and 2 liters for a recipe). Fry the bacon in its own fat until it starts to brown.
3. Fry the loin cup in the bacon fat, just until golden brown on both sides. Reserve.
4. Sauté, adding one at a time, the onion, leek, carrot and celery. Cover with about 1 liter of boiling water.
5. Drain and rinse the lentils. Add it to the stew. Return the loin cup to the pan. Add the potato.
6. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, for about 1 hour or until the peas break down. Remove the loin cup, chop the meat and put it back in the stew.
7. Cook until the desired consistency is achieved, adding more water if necessary. Season with salt and pepper.