Peas out: Barack Obama joins online outcry against guacamole recipe

The greatest debate in the history of guacamole arrived on Wednesday, as a heretic recipe from the New York Times outraged the internet and forced no less a connoisseur than Barack Obama to weigh in.

The great guac-off of 2015 was not about extra charges for the dip – it was about adding an extra vegetable … quite an unnecessary one, according to people with too much time on their hands.

A recipe for “Green Pea Guacamole” – adapted from New York’s ABC Cocina restaurant and tweeted out by the New York Times – calls for a radical notion:

“Add green peas to your guacamole. Trust us,” the newspaper told its 17.7 million followers.

Not many people did.

Some told the Times to delete its account, while others called out the publication for distributing “possibly the worst food advice ever”. Some websites glommed on, suggesting there were worse things you could add to the Mexican avocado mix – ranch dressing, cream – and Twitter exploded in bad puns, with “Guaca-NO-le” being hardly the worst of it.

But the mockamole of “pea-gate” quickly escalated to a bipartisan political platform.

The Texas Republican party took to Twitter to say the Times had “declared war on Texas when they suggested adding green peas to guacamole”.

Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush had already established his opinion on the matter (anti-pea) during a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon. On Wednesday, he stood by his platform: “You don’t put peas in guacamole,” he wrote.

Somehow, the pea politics made their way up to the White House, as Obama revealed during a previously scheduled Twitter Q&A that he prefers his guacamole the classic way … except with peppers.

So the current president and the brother of his predecessor at least agree on that.

In an accompanying link to a recipe for the extra-green guacamole, the Times’ Melissa Clark wrote: “Adding fresh English peas to what is an otherwise fairly traditional guacamole is one of those radical moves that is also completely obvious after you taste it.”

The recipe in question is about two years old, and originated at ABC Cocina from chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

The guacamole received significant attention in 2013, when several food critics and writers weighed in on the dish. Clark wrote about the guacamole in July 2013 for the Times’s Restaurant Takeaway column.

ABC Cocina told the Guardian, which published a recipe for guacamole with pomegranate seeds in 2013, that “Jean-Georges has decided to pass on the opportunity to comment on this issue.”