 How long do you cook asparagus for?
It depends on how thick the spears are. The early ‘grass’, as it’s commonly called, is thin and cooks in as little as 3-4 minutes. The thicker spears, about the thickness of a little or fourth finger, should be prepared as follows: hold the base of each spear and bend the top over until it snaps; where it breaks is the point where the woody part below starts which would be tough and not nice to eat, so discard these.
If necessary, you can trim the sides a little, or just the lowest 2 inches or so, using a swivel vegetable peeler – it all depends on the season. English asparagus is the best, and I eat a lot of it when it comes into season, but most of us make do with imported varieties at other times of the year, which is obviously what you will be cooking at the moment.
Incidentally, you can make asparagus keep much better by treating it as though it was a bunch of fresh flowers. As soon as you get home, cut off the bottom half inch and then place the spears cut-side down in a tall jug and add water to come halfway up them. The stems will then take up the water and this keeps them from going soft too quickly during storage in the refrigerator.
To cook, bring a pan of well-salted water to a rapid boil. Drop them in and return to the boil as quickly as possible, and simmer thicker stems until just tender, certainly no more than seven minutes or so. Drain well and serve with plenty of melted butter or warm Hollandaise sauce.
You can get special asparagus steamers, which are tall and have a cage inside to lift them out. The thinking behind these is the thicker stems cook submerged in the boiling water and the delicate spears at the top cook in the steam above. I find using a large, broad-based pan gives excellent results, and I am an asparagus connoisseur.
A final tip: if you blanch lots of parsley in the water fist, it will become full of the chlorophyll given off so that when the parsley is removed, and the asparagus is dropped in there will be little if any leeching out of its vibrant green into the water as it is already laden with chlorophyll.
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