Black Eyed Peas and Ham Hocks

Ok we are back with a crockpot and Instant Pot black eyed peas and ham recipe! No matter what method you use this comes out hearty and is really cheap to make too. If you have a pressure cooker at home we have this + 101+ Instant Pot recipes to choose from.

Make it in your Crockpot Express, Ninja Foodior IP. These aren’t just ordinary peas, they have luck in that bag too. 😉 If it is near New Years Eve you might want to make this because it’s tradition. They’re pretty amazing year round too though.

We are going to focus on Instant Pot black eyed peas today but will share other methods of cooking as well. I will say using a pressure cooker to cook dry beans in general is your best bet. You can get them super tender in very little time and there is no soaking required really.

We started using dry beans in our pressure cooker first when we made the most amazing no soak Instant Pot baked beans. Then went on to make pressure cooker bean soup. Now we just can’t stop cooking from scratch because it’s so easy!

Ingredient Notes

You are going to want a bag of dry black eyed peas to start off with. You can find these with all of the other varieties at the grocery store, they are super cheap.

Should dry black-eyed peas be soaked?

Not if using a pressure cooker, we don’t with our Instant Pot Hoppin John either. These instructions use dried peas that have just been rinsed to remove debris and in less than an hour they will become perfectly tender.

Can you use canned black eyed peas?

I mean you can use canned and you won’t need to cook it much at all. In that case I would cut the ham off the bone as much as possible and throw that in with the other ingredients, cans don’t need to be drained. You could cut down the cook time to only 10 minutes just to get the meat tender and meld the flavors together.

Leftover meat or whole ham hocks will lend to a lot of flavor. You will want to add these at the beginning so they have a lot of time to get fork tender where the meat falls off the bone! I find you can make it two ways, as a kind of black eyed peas soup and a thicker version where it is more like a baked beans consistency with ham in it.

To get a lot of flavor into it just use diced tomatoes, canned, I like the petite version and you can find them with Italian seasonings already too.

And to thin things out a bit we used chicken broth, really any broth will do but it is better than water to add a bit of salt in there naturally.

How Long to Cook Black Eyed Peas and Ham Hocks in Pressure Cooker

You would want to dice your oven baked ham leftovers into bite size pieces if you aren’t using a ham hock (which is recommended for the best flavor overall). From there you just add all ingredients into the pot and cook for just 30 minutes!! When done you want to naturally release the steam a bit to keep the meat as tender as possible so it literally falls off the bone when you lift the lid.

If you want to know the best way of how to cook ham hocks this is it. Just throw them in first with the other items around them. Cut off meat at the end and discard bones etc.. Then keep it thicker or thin out with just some broth or water.

This is faster than our Crockpot black eyed peas recipe or slow cooker Hoppin John but with the same result so why wouldn’t you make it quicker??!!

Of course you can make black eyed peas and cabbage too if you wanted to include a vegetable in the mix.