Hoppin' John

In the South, it is said that eating this dish at the start of the new year will bring you 365 days of good luck. Since it takes so long to prepare, we understand why they wait 364 days before making it again. We were determined to cut down the cooking time while still maintaining all the richness of this stick-to-your-ribs southern classic. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Fresh black-eyed peas are hard to come by, so many recipes rely on the dried variety. This adds hours to the cooking time, so we tested both canned and frozen black-eyed peas and discovered frozen worked just as well in less than an hour.
• Cooking the rice and black-eyed peas together makes for deep flavor, but also makes the dish overly starchy. We rinsed the rice with water first to remove some of the excess starch.
• To shave some more time off this recipe, we steered clear of ham hocks, which take far too long to give up their flavor. Sliced boneless ham did the trick in a quarter of the time.