Peas please. We follow the green from field to freezer - Foodepedia

Just where do frozen peas come from and just how good are they? We travel to Norfolk to watch peas from the pod become peas in a pack in just under two hours

Peas! Peas everywhere, millions possibly billions of the things all cascading, frozen hard, into giant containers that fill in seconds before being whisked off by fork lift truck to the cold store. A fresh and empty container is swiftly wheeled in to take its place.

Time is of the essence. These same peas were happily growing in a field just under an hour ago. To satisfy the demands of customers like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, Pinguin’s promise of fresh to frozen in under ninety minutes must be kept. After all, it’s going to say that on the packet and that makes it binding.

It’s also the secret to the great taste of frozen peas. A pea’s natural sugar starts to turn to starch almost as soon as it is picked; freezing will stop that process and lock in nutrients, but it must be done rapidly. A so called fresh pea in its pod at a farmers’ market is nothing of the sort. It may look cute, but the flavour and goodness will be long gone.

Out in the pea fields earlier as the sun beats down, there is the feel of a military campaign going on. The giant harvesting machines cost over a quarter of a million pounds each and they cannot stop once the man in charge of the harvest has decided a field is ready to crop. Delay is disaster and so a massive portakabin follows the machines around day and night with enough tools and spare parts to keep the machines running in almost any circumstance. The engineers sleep in the fields with their charges ready to leap up and start fixing at a moment’s notice.

The smell of peas is all around. The machines hoover up great swathes of pea plants into their giant bellies where a tumbling action separates peas from pods. The peas go into a container, the pods and stems are spat out the back where they will fall to the ground to manure the next vegetable crop. As soon as the machine is full the driver flashes an orange light and, without stopping, a tender comes alongside to receive the peas and rush them to the waiting lorries. The harvester doesn’t even pause, but carries on down the endless rows.

The logistics are frightening. The man in charge of the harvest not only has to decide the day to do it, but must plan his attacks on the fields carefully. The area is wide, across Norfolk and beyond and the harvesting machines are slow when travelling around, just 16mph. This means the fields to be harvested each day must be as close together as possible to maximise efficiency, and although at planning stage months earlier careful selection of varieties and staggered planting times try to achieve this, nature is capricious.

And so is the traffic. The roads back to the Pinguin factory are small, one dawdling car and the peas’ headlong rush to beat the deadline can be compromised. The peas won’t be wasted, they will still be frozen within two and a half hours and still be delicious, they just won’t make the grade for the more demanding customers, but they will still find a happy home as standard frozen peas.

Here come the peas.

We’re now standing in an even more ferocious sun at Pinguin’s arrival point in their enormous factory outside Kings Lynn, Norfolk. Lorry loads of the peas we’ve just seen being harvested pause at the weigh station then disgorge into a giant funnel where they fall through onto a moving staircase to begin their journey to the freezer. All the way they pass through various methods to remove remaining debris of pods and stems and any possible stones. These systems range from simple physics such as water- the peas float, stones don’t - and riddling systems that let only peas of a certain size fall through, to rigorous laser inspection at the latter stages. Quality control is total and women mustn’t wear rings with diamonds in case by some fluke one should fall into the peas and end up in a bag. Hair nets, crisp white coats and hand scrubbing at every doorway maintain total cleanliness throughout the plant.

A brief blanching takes place then the peas march into the giant freezing machine. The freezing is not done by any method that releases nasty CFCs, instead ammonia gas is used. The ammonia gas is pressurised until it becomes a liquid with the heat released being recycled; this liquid is then passed through an expansion chamber where it boils at -27C. This supercold gas then passes through pipes in the freezer to freeze the peas very quickly. The gas is then repressurised back to liquid and the cycle starts again. It’s a very efficient and environmentally friendly process

The peas come out with a light frosting and bullet hard enough to be able to take any knocks thrown at them. Once defrosted they will resume the tenderness they had when they were checked and passed at the weighing station. There a machine actually crushes a single example pea and thus measures how tough or tender it is

Frozen peas are stored in vast quantities according to their grade. Unlike peas in your freezer, these can remain in store for a year or more because the temperature is accurately controlled and never varies. Then on customer order they are checked again for foreign bodies, and any rogue lumps of ice, before being packed into each customers branded bag in a large room that resembles a James Bond villain’s hideout. This state-of-the-art equipment has the capacity to produce over 120,000 tonnes of product per year including 27,000 tonnes of peas.

Pinguin don’t just freeze peas. This Belgian company also freezes locally grown runner beans and broad beans too. They also freeze vegetables that are shipped to them, in some cases from as far away as China, vegetables that don’t have the same crucial timings that peas have.

In Pinguin’s test kitchens as we have watched veg being frozen they have been busy cooking up some dishes to show how perfect frozen food is. We all doubt the claims of the frozen new potatoes, but they are very good indeed. As is the frozen mixed Mediterranean vegetables with herbs and the frozen mash used for a fish pie. A blind comparison of ‘fresh’ peas from a local supermarket against frozen isn’t really blind at all as you can see at a glance which peas look fresher, juicier, more colourful and more tasty – the frozen ones of course.

Having regarded frozen vegetables as poor relations of fresh, I’ve had my ideas changed by Pinguin. Seeing the process is an eye opener as to the care and quality that is so important to them and to us the final consumers.

As a method of enjoying veg at their best any time of year, frozen can’t be beaten. It’s time to lob out all those ready meals in the freezer and use the space to store great produce at its best. And making great meals from frozen items is easy, in fact there’s a web site sponsored by the frozen food industry that is full of great ideas – www.thenewiceage.com. It’s also full of information about where our frozen food comes from and how you can be a part of the quality control process from field to freezer.

If you’re green about frozen veg, it’s a great place to begin the process of being a hot supporter of this often misunderstood process.