You can use them as a part of the main course or as a tasty vegetable side. Then, you can slice your asparagus diagonally or chop it into small pieces to add a healthy crunch to your dish. To know how much of the stalk to cut off, pick up one asparagus and bend it near the middle until the bottom snaps off.
Now, you'll cut off the same amount from the rest of the stalks in the bunch. Finally, discard the trimmed stalks and cook or prepare your asparagus. For more tips, including how to snap off the ends of your asparagus rather than cutting, read on! Did this summary help you?
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Rinse the asparagus under cool water. Remove any dirt or grit that might be on your asparagus. To dry, roll spears at a time between 2 kitchen towels. The spears spoil quickly and will go bad even faster if you wash them before storing them.
Lay spears on a cutting board with their flat ends in line. Using a long, sharp knife, cut about 1 inch 2. Grasp the ends of spears and bend them. The woody end should snap off at just about where the tough, white-brown stalk meets the softer green part. Peel the woody lower half with a vegetable peeler. This is something a lot of cooks, professional and non-, have cottoned on to through experience, but the shadow of bend-and-snap still looms large over conventional cooking wisdom.
While working on a more complete guide to asparagus several years back, Kenji ran some tests and demonstrated that the bend-and-snap method could produce a break at pretty much any point along the length of the stalk. His results varied wildly depending on how much pressure he applied, even when he held the stalks at the exact same spot every time, a level of scrupulousness that most of us don't want to bother with.
How you flex the stalk can also influence where it breaks, rendering the bend-and-snap trick highly unreliable. More recently, Daniel carried out a similar demonstration, and got the same outcome:.
As the photo makes clear, you can waste a lot of perfectly edible asparagus this way. That asparagus wants to be trimmed, all right—it just wants it a little too much. Though it doesn't make that same satisfying snapping sound, it's far easier to simply line up the asparagus stalks and look at where they appear to start toughening up toward the ends.
That generally corresponds with where most stalks' green color starts to fade to white. Then cut off those hard ends with a chef's knife—you know, just as you would when trimming other vegetables.
If bend-and-snap is what works best for you, more power to you! But if, like us, you've found that the snapping trick doesn't quite do the trick, a good old-fashioned knife-and-cutting-board combo may help get these spring beauties into the pan, and into your mouth, a bit faster.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Don't waste a single bite. Spring—and asparagus season—is right around the corner. Soon bunches of vibrant green stalks will be popping up at farm stands and grocery stores. Whether you prefer your asparagus on the thick or thin side, it's important to trim the pale ends of each stalk because they tend to be woody and tough.
You might be accustomed to simply bending each stalk until it snaps in half, especially if you grew up snapping green beans. It's a simple method, and doesn't even require a knife. The stalk will break right where it starts to get tough—or that's what you've been told all these years. The truth is that the bend-and-snap method can actually waste perfectly good asparagus.
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