How To Cook Grilled Asparagus

"This is how to make grilled asparagus. First of all, you have fresh asparagus. We have a pile of water on the boiler there. Now, trimming your asparagus, if you grab your asparagus one hand on one end and the other hand there and just bend it, it will snap at the point where the woodiness stops and the ripe asparagus begins as if by magic. So, do that to all your asparagus, like that, and if you are feeling you want a pretty presentation, you can always just trim out the ends with a little diagonal cut, like that. Then, what we are going to do is a process we called blanching and refreshing, which means that you plunge the asparagus into the boiling water, cook it until it's just done, and then you remove it from the hot water and plunge it into the cold water. What that does is it stops the cooking process, so it helps to retain the bright green colour of the asparagus. So, once you've trimmed the asparagus, straight into the boiling water, that will take three minutes, something like that, but again, that's personal taste. If you like your asparagus nice and crunchy, take it out sooner; if you like it softer, take it out later. Bear in mind that after we've blanched and refreshed it, we are going to put it in the grill panel as well. So, bear that in mind. So when the asparagus is just cooked, take the pan off the heat, get that asparagus straight out of the hot water and straight into the nice cold water. As I said, that will stop the cooking and hold on to that bright green colour. Meanwhile, we have our grill pan which has been on the heat and is really nice and hot. What we're going to do with the asparagus is when it's cooled down, get it out of water, just drain it off a little bit, and then we're going to put it in the grill pan. So, the grill pan is there to give you that smokey barbecue and to give a bit of nice colour on the side but the actual cooking has taken place in the water, okay? If we try and grill this asparagus from raw in the pan, what you'll probably end up with is very grilled asparagus that is raw in the middle and it's not necessarily a pleasant eating experience so just very carefully, lay the asparagus into the grill pan, and it won't take long to get those nice grill marks on the side and you can leave it for thirty seconds and then shake the pan, move it around a little bit. So, after a couple of minutes, we've got some nice grill marks on the asparagus, we've already cooked through, so into the pan, with the butter and very quickly, lemon juice. Give it a shake. And that's how you make grilled asparagus with lemon and butter.