Slow Cooker Split Pea Soup Recipe

It can feel like today's innovations in home cooking are all about speed and efficiency. An Instant Pot can cook up meals in a fraction of the time traditional methods would, and instead of waiting around for your oven to preheat, you can turn to an air fryer to crisp up food instantly. However, making food quickly isn't the only way. Sometimes, the opposite approach is best. Slow cooking has been around for a while, and for good reason. When you prepare a meal in a Crock Pot or other slow cooker, it can indeed take many hours. However, with a little advance planning, slow cooking your food can be easy as pie. You don't have to constantly tend to a bubbling pot for hours; just set it and forget it, and after several hours of doing whatever you'd like to do, dinner will be ready before you know it.

In this case, dinner is a hearty split pea soup, courtesy of recipe developer Miriam Hahn. Enjoying a steaming bowl of split pea soup isn't just comforting, it's also good for you — "Split peas are very high in protein, fiber, iron and folate. They are also an anti inflammatory food and they keep you full a long time," Hahn explains. And, not only are peas good for you, but they happen to taste delightful in a soup!

Any good recipe starts with well-prepared ingredients. For this soup, you'll need dried split peas, plus vegetable broth (or your preferred broth), chopped onion and celery, diced carrot and potatoes, and minced garlic. Seasoning-wise, measure out some smoked paprika, dried thyme and oregano, and salt, plus the juice of half a lemon. Then, chop up some Italian parsley for your garnish at the end. "I pretty much always choose Italian Parsley over regular. I think it is so much better tasting and the texture is not so rough," Hahn explains. If you don't have dried thyme or don't prefer it, you can use fresh thyme — if you're dong this, Hahn recommends using a tablespoon. If you eat meat, Hahn suggests adding some diced ham to the pot. "You can just add deli ham sliced thick and then cubed," she notes.

Once you've gathered, measured, and chopped, the rest of this process is easy. Start by adding the bulk of your ingredients to your slow cooker, specifically the potatoes, carrots, celery, garlic, onion, thyme, oregano, salt, and paprika. Then, pour in your broth of choice.

Give everything in your slow cooker a good stir, and then turn it on. If you're cooking on high, it'll take about four to five hours, and if you're cooking on low, it'll be between seven and nine hours. Then, the waiting game begins. "If you make split pea soup on the stove it takes a couple of hours and if you come and go a lot like I do, that doesn't work too well," Hahn says. "I love how you can leave the slow cooker unattended and it does [its] magic all day. I love how it smells and there is something really satisfying about making dinner before work in the morning!"

After the appropriate amount of hours have passed and your split peas have gone from dried to soft, add in your parsley, lemon juice, and ham, if you're using it. Once you do that, it's soup time! You can serve this soup any way you'd like, of course, but Hahn says she enjoys pairing a bowl of her split pea soup with "a green salad or steamed broccoli."

This makes enough to feed six people, so depending on how many people are coming to dinner, you may have soup to spare. "Leftovers will last up to 5 days in a sealed container," Hahn says. You can also freeze your leftovers, which will make them last two months.