We’ll tell you when a bottle in your cellar reaches its window, or an ingredient you cook with comes into season.
Preparing
Rotate to portrait
PAIR is designed to be held upright. Turn your phone back to portrait to keep going.
Pea
Pisum sativum · Vegetable
1 variety40 pairings
The pea (Pisum sativum) is the round green seed of a climbing annual legume, borne several to a pod and eaten fresh, frozen, dried or — in the edible-podded sorts — pod and all. Sweet, grassy and faintly nutty at their best, garden peas race from sugar to starch within hours of picking, which is why most of the crop is shelled and frozen in the field.
Picking a good onedrag
Squeaky, just pickedYellow, floury, going off
Shop freshThe all-rounder: shell and steam, blanch for salads, or freeze them.Everyday best
Pod (garden pea, for shelling)Green, the seeds outlined through it
The snapFirm, snaps clean, the break a little dry
Calyx and stemCalyx paling, cut end dry and clean
Split a podFaintly green and clean; peas firm
What to look for, from squeaky, just picked to yellow, floury, going off.
Keeping ittap a band
A domestic fridge holds it about 5× longer than the counter.
Humidity
95-98%
Damp air, dry pods. AH-66 allows wet pods only below 2 C, and a home fridge sits above that, so keep them unwashed in a perforated bag and rinse at the sink instead.
Airflow
Vented, and podded
Leave them in the pod - AH-66 finds garden peas keep better unshelled - in a perforated bag, and get them cold the hour you buy them.
Yellows beside apples
Peas make almost no ethylene themselves but are moderately sensitive to it: apples, pears and ripening fruit yellow the pods and speed decay, the calyx going first.