How To Prepare Asparagus

Hello! I am going to show you how to prepare asparagus. It sounds very simple, and believe me, it is. You've got a long spear here and actually, there's quite a bit that we can do with these.

The first is if you just snap it like that, we'll do a couple of them, nature finds its own way of telling you where it comes off at. Now, don't throw those away because you can make a nice soup with them. You'd maybe fry off some onion and garlic in a pan.

You chop these up, you'd add some stock, blitz it all up and then if you are interested in knowing how to thicken the soup up, you can see our video on How to Thicken Soup. However, we're now going to carry on preparing this. Now, as you can see, there's a lot of these little nodules all the way along, so what you want to do is peel those away.

Just got to do this properly, like that, get rid of all of those or you can just peel them away with your finger, whichever you prefer. I actually prefer doing it with the peeler, seeing as you have got it, why have a dog and bark yourself, I think, the expression goes. Right, and now, just to make this look more fancy, what you can do is you can just peel the bottoms like that and obviously, what you can also do is all these trimmings here can then go in your soup.

So I'm just going to do a couple more, just down here, and as you do it, you sort of turn it around so you can do it a little bit quicker. As far as cooking the asparagus goes, it's very, very simple. The easiest thing to do when you cook asparagus is to overcook it.

If you blanch them in a pan, and by blanch, I mean, just throw them in a pan of boiling water, I normally don't cook asparagus for any more than about a minute. That's all it needs before it's ready because you want it to have that nice al dente crunch, and I think just serving that with some melted butter, a bit of black pepper and maybe a squeeze of lemon juice is almost perfect, although for me, perfection is serving asparagus with a Hollandaise sauce, and all you do is you get some egg yolks, mix it with a bit hot melted butter, until it emulsifies, add some lemon juice, a bit of black pepper, if you want to really, really spice things up, a little drizzle of Tabasco sauce, and there you have it. But those are beautifully prepared asparagus spears ready for boiling. .