French Chef; 124; Asparagus from Tip to Butt

What's lovelier than spring? It's warm wetter- weather at last and the first fresh asparagus is in the markets. What dreams of butter and glory! It's asparagus, from tip to butt, today on The French Chef. [THEME MUSIC PLAYS] The French Chef is made possible by a grant from the Polaroid Corporation. And by a grant from Hills Brothers Coffee Incorporated. [THEME MUSIC ENDS] I just adore a fresh asparagus and I think I'm terribly serious about it so I always go to a market that takes asparagus very seriously and lovingly, because I've found that a lot of markets just don't seem to care very much what they do with it and they let it sit out where the - where it all gets dried up and - and stale and if you notice when you see a big crate of asparagus like this, there's always a piece of - of cotton or sort of

material that's absorbent in the bottom, and it's supposed to - the bottoms or the butts of the asparagus are supposed to be kept moist. And if you don't, if they're not - if the store is not going to keep it in the, uh, in a crate like this and keep it moist, they should at least stand it up in bunches so that the butts are standing in about half an inch of water. Because you have to think that asparagus is just like a flower and you have to keep it moist and cool, or else it just dries up and it isn't good, so I pick a store very carefully and I also pick one where I can pick all the asparagus personally so that I can get them all the same size. And when you're buying asparagus, you want to be sure - I'm going to show you an example of a good asparagus and a bad asparagus. Now, here's a good one. You want to make sure that the butts are quite moist and that they're firm, even all the way up the end. And then at the end, the tip is tightly

closed and the little scales are just nothing but scales - that they're - that the- the asparagus doesn't look like this. Now look at the tip here - it's beginning to get loose and rather than having scales, there are little flower buds that are coming out underneath. And this one also has a dowager's hump, which means that it isn't very good, it's a little - maybe a little old, and it has a fissure going down through the middle. So if you would never - if you could find - if you could pick out the asparagus yourself, you'd never pick one like this, which is a bad example. You would pick one that was fresh and green and straight, like this. So if you pick your store rightly, you'll - right, you'll be able to get the kind of asparagus you like. And if it doesn't look right, don't buy it, because you'll be disappointed in it. And when you bring it home, if you're not going to use it right away, I would suggest if the butts seem a little bit dry that you gather all the butts together and then just cut off a little bit, until you get to the

moist flesh, and then stick it in a pot with about half an inch of water because, again, like a flower, if the butt is in water, the asparagus will stay fresh. And then I usually put it - put a plastic bag over it and then stick it in the refrigerator, and I find that it will keep even, oh, two or three days this way. Of course, the sooner you - sooner you cook it, the better. I know an awful a lot of people who have asparagus gardens of their own, get the water boiling and then they rush out and they cut all the asparagus and they dump it right in and they don't let it stay out for more than two or three minutes. I found - I've never had an asparagus patch, and I have a black thumb anyway so I don't suppose it would grow - but I find that if you keep it damp and keep it cold that, uh, that it keeps extremely fresh and tastes very good. And now, when you're ready to prepare it,

you have a lot of people who just take the asparagus and they hold onto the butt end and then they bend it until it breaks off, and then they throw away the butt. And that's a terribly wasteful way of cooking asparagus, because this butt, if you have good, fresh asparagus, is just as - you can eat it just as much as the rest of the asparagus. So if you want to enjoy it to the full, you should cook it the way the French do and prepare it that way, which means you have to peel it. And that means taking a little knife and cutting off about a quarter of an inch of the butt and then peeling all the way up until it gets t- very tender up, about two inches from the top. And how deeply you peel the butt is - depends on how fresh and young it is - and you can always tell by looking very carefully. You peel just as deeply until you get to the moist flesh.

If it's sort of dry and stringy, that means you've got to peel a little deeper and then you slant slowly upwards until you come to the very tender part. I'll do one more. I always find - I like the - I like the knife better, just because I'm used to using it. This one is green all almost all the way down and very tender, so the butt just needs a little shaving. And be sure that you have a very, very sharp knife, because if you have a dull thing, you find that the peeling is very difficult. I find that holding it this way so that it rests against my wrist, it goes very quickly. And also, I think - well, if you're going to peel, and you really should, get the fattest experi - asparagus you can, because fat asparagus is just as tender as little, other asparagus. Now if you don't like to use the knife, you can try the vegetable peeler, which I think is a horrible system because the -

it all gets caught in the - in the peeler and you can't get deep enough on the butt. Now, here's a French of - vegetable peeler. It's a knife that has a little guard on it - and this is used by French restaurant people - and you lie the asparagus down and just peel. And of course then, the - the peel gets stuck in the knife, but French people seem to like it very much. Now, my husband who is a wonderful asparagus peeler, uses a Norwegian cheese knife which makes cheese slices. And I think this works very well, too. He prefers this to the knife. So, anyway, I think you'll find after you've done quite a bit of asparagus that you - you pick your own system of peeling, but I think that you will find if you've never done - if you've never taken the trouble to peel asparagus, you find that it makes absolutely all the difference in the world in the asp - in the asparagus and how it eats.

And I'm going to give you a little example. I have here on my board two cooked asparagus. And this is a cooked, unpeeled asparagus. It's of top quality. And I just want to show you, as you cut it - this is just a plain table knife - and it cuts and it cuts, cuts. As you get down here, it gets a little harder to cut and it's sort of stringy. You get down to here and it's very stringy. So you can't really eat that part. Now, here is the peeled asparagus. Cut, cut, cut. Getting down to the butt. You see, you can cut perfectly easily all the way down just with a plain table fork, and you can eat the butt. Q.E.D., as they say in the - whatever it is. I guess it's geometry courses. courses. It's so long ago, I can't remember what it wa - what it was! But I think if you make this experiment yourself, you'll find that it is absolutely

conclusive. And then after you have your asparagus all prepared, you - you have to wash it. And here's some that's been all peeled. And just have a sink full of cold water - and it doesn't need to be - it doesn't need to be washed very much, just squished all around. If, by any chance, you find that the - that the asparagus is sandy, you may have to lift off some of the scales, or even wash it in warm water. Then - there's your washed asparagus. And now, if you're going to cook it the French way, it should be tied. And you'll see when we - you'll see when we cook it, how to - how it's - how - what - the reason for tying it. And you want to gather it up in bunches of about two and a half inches

in diameter. We've got two bunches here, so I want to have a tie at the top and a tie at the bottom and a double one, so I want about 16 - four 16-inch pieces of string. Maybe that's 18 inches, I can't quite tell, but I'm having it big enough. You get your string all ready. A lot of this seems like a - like a terrible lot of trouble, but asparagus is certainly one of our absolutely most beautiful vegetables and it's a vegetable that should be taken seriously and given all the care and attention that it needs. Because then, you will really enjoy it to the full. Now, see, there was one tie at the top and one tie at the bottom. This is really all done very quickly. And I'm going to leave one spear out, and you'll see why later.

Line them up. You want to line them up at the tips so that the tips are all together. This is all in - safe and easy cooking and easy removal, so that the asparagus will not break and will remain as long and beautiful as it is now. You know, the - one of the advantages in peeling are that the asparagus cooks faster, stays greener and tastes much fresher and has a better texture. It also remains much more dramatic and long. And I've left one loose so that I can use it as a cooking test. And I want to cook three bunches of asparagus. And all - this is - I'm going to cook this in the French manner. Now, after you - after you've done the peeling and tying, you can do this ahead of time and just wrap it in some damp paper towels and put it in a plastic bag and leave it in the refrigerator. As

long as it's damp and cold, it will s - it will not lose its texture, so you could, if you were having a party, you could peel this in the morning and then wrap it in the damp paper towels in the plastic bag and refrigerate it and then cook it just before - just bef - just before you're ready to serve it. And this is going into a large pot of rapidly boiling water. And I'm putting three in there. And I'm going to have one spear loose. And then we have six quarts of water in here, so I want about three tablespoons of salt. Some people don't salt the water until halfway through the cooking. I like to salt it right away because I like to have - be sure that the salt is in the asparagus because it has so much - it makes a great deal of difference to me in the flavor. And you want to be sure that you have a big pot because again, this is the French method of vegetable cooking, of having a large

pot of rapidly boiling water so that the asparagus is seized as it goes in. I could really even use a turkey boiler, it would be better. This is just sort of a medium-sized roaster which I - I find is very useful for vegetable boiling as well as roasts and stews. And then, this will take - after it comes to the boil, this will take about - because this is very fresh - will take about six minutes of boiling. So set your timer for about five minutes and then test after five minutes because you don't want to over - overcook it. And now, we have other types of - types of cooking utensils for asparagus. And this is a covered one. Of course, asparagus should cook not covered - it if it's cooked in the French way, you just don't cover it at all - but this is an asparagus boiler with a rack, so that you don't have to tie the asparagus, you can just put it in and let it cook. But I think with this size, you could only -

you could only cook about a bunch or two because you've the idea of having the rapidly boiling water and having it boil quickly could only cook - cook a small amount in it. And then we have another kind - this is for the people, those lazy ones who refuse to peel asparagus. And this is a steaming method. It has a rack and you put the asparagus in there and then you put water in, about two inches to here, and then you cover it up and the bottoms boil and the tops steam. And I guess if you're not going to peel asparagus, that's probably the best way of cooking it. And if you didn't have anything else and you still were a non-peller, you could use a coffee pot and boil the butts and steam the top and put a cork in the spout. The only question would be I don't know how you get the asparagus out without breaking it all. And then of course, in, uh, in the non - non-asparagus season, you

can always use frozen asparagus. This is quite nice large spears. You can get jumbo spears and you can get cut asparagus. And I'm one who never follows the directions on the box of a package. I like - from my experiments, I like to cook it in a large pot of boiling water and I let it defrost just enough so it's loose, and then I just put it in and use a salad basket so I can easily lift it out and let it boil rapidly uncovered and add some salt for about six to eight minutes. I guess I'd better put some salt in that or it won't taste the way it should. I find that this method of the - of the big pot seems to make it taste a little bit fresher than boiling it the way they say on the package in a little covered pot with some salt - I find it gets sort of mushy that way. You notice with the frozen asparagus, they never peel it, so that you'll get that as we saw when we cut it off, you get that sort of filinbrous part.

So this is - I'm going to move this over to the other side. Well, I think a lovely thing about, uh, hot asparagus is, um, if you're on a diet - which I find I often have to be - it's one of those vegetables that you can eat with - with just nothing but lemon and salt. Or, of course, you can use melted butter or lemon butter or brown butter or hollandaise, and I'm going to make a type of hollandaise called a sauce Maltaise, which is a hollandaise with orange flavor, and it's absolutely delicious. I've often heard about it. Then I- I thought, "Oh heavens! That sounds sort of queer!" so I - then one day, I tried it and I found it was absolutely delicious and it makes a terribly nice change. You can also use it with broccoli and it's perfectly delicious. You want - I'm going to make about a cup

of it and I want - I'm - have the grated rind of one orange. And then we want a mixture of orange and lemon juice, about two or three tablespoons. So I'm just going to put that in my little juicer. This really is made just exactly like a hollandaise and I just purposely did it so that we could do hollandaise again without too much talking and you'll see again how easy it is to do. Three egg yolks. And that's a little pan. And as you'll remember, you always - before you do anything, you beat up the egg yolks until they get thick and sticky, which is about a minute, and never - this is, as you'll remember in both mayonnaise and hollandaise, you always beat the egg yolks before you do anything. It just gets them into

shape so that they won't be blocky. And then a little bit of salt, about a quarter teaspoon salt, and about 2 - 2 tablespoons of mixed orange and lemon juice. And beat it up again. And then, over moderate direct heat, beat it until it begins to thicken into a custard. And I think that - that you ought to get in the habit of not getting so scared of egg yolks and hollandaise and not worry about beating it over direct heat because you can always lift the pan up, you see the way I'm doing. So you have perfectly - perfect control of it. And remember always that your object is that you're heating the egg yolks slowly and gradually, until they thicken. See I'm moving it on and off? And now, there's a little bit of steam that's just beginning to come up, so that shows me that the egg yolks are just gonna

begin to thicken. And remember, too, that you have some grated orange peel in here so that those little lumps you see are not lumps of eggs - at least, not yet. But I think if you're gonna get in the - you just have to learn to do the - do the direct method of hollandaise. And even if you do scramble an egg or two at first - now, see now, that's getting thick. You see that's - that's your thick custard now. See how quick and easy that is? And now, the butter is ready to go in, and you can add from three-fourths to one cup. And remember that at first, just like making a mayonnaise, the butter has to go in just in little driblets. This is just plain melted butter. Because you'll remember that delicate digestion of the egg yolk

and if the butter goes in too fast, the digestion, which is a slow process in the egg yolk, doesn't take, so that's why at the beginning, you just have to do it in little driblets. The thauce - sauce is nice and thick now, so it can go a little bit faster. Remember also, do not go over a cup and a quarter of butter - that would be a little over two sticks - but you can add less, if you'd like. But you see how extremely fast that is to do. And you just have to determine that you're going to do it because it's part of your cooking mastery that makes - and I think it's so much fun to do it by hand because you have complete control. See that's a nice, thick sauce, and you want to taste it now to make sure that it's

just right. Mmm it's just delicious. Wait till you try it. That sort of little whisper of orange taste is delicious. Now, if you're going to make it ahead, leave it on the top of the stove for it's lukewarm. Be sure that you don't overheat it or it'll - it'll just thin out or curdle. But we've seen how to bring it back, which is very easy indeed. And now, I'm going to see how the asparagus is doing. I'll bring it over here so we can get a better - better look at it. I think it's not quite done yet. You can tell by lifting it up and that just needs a little bit - a little bit more. But you just have to - in any green vegetable cooking, you can't go by a vegetable timing table. You have to be right over that and watch it because as soon as it's done, it - you should take it out.

And now, on the other hand, we're going to serve this - this fresh asparagus hot. But if you want to serve asparagus cold, we will do this on the frozen asparagus. After that's done, you'll see how nice this salad basket is. Have a tray and a folded towel and just dump it out. And then, if you're going to serve asparagus cold, you want to be very sure that you separate it because if you leave it all in a lump and it cools off, it loses its lovely fresh texture because it's steaming. And what it should do is to - is to cool separately, so it will cool as quickly as possible. And then after that's cooled, then you can serve with whatever kind of a sauce you're going to use. And now, I think the - our fresh asparagus is done, I want to show you this asparagus platter. It has an insert in it - if I can get it out - with holes. See?

So that all the asparagus water goes down into the bottom of the platter. And then, the - so you don't have a lot of messy water when you're serving asparagus. This is also good for fish. And now, when your asparagus is done, you want to lift it up and it should just very - you see that's just very slightly drooping? Just very slightly - it shouldn't - if it droops too much, it's overdone. And this is why we had the loose spear. We'll see how that is by cutting it and then eating a piece. It's a little too hot, but how you can tell by eating through - maybe I can eat it - just - just done. You want it to be very slightly crunchy. But the - it's a shame when you've gone to all this work to overcook it. Now you're gonna see how - see the reason for the strings. I can lift it right over there and there's no damaging of the asparagus.

Cut off the strings. And spread it out. Let it drip off. If you don't have an asparagus platter, use a double damask dinner napkin, which will absorb the water. You have to - always have to train to get your - so that you can hot - handle things as hot as possible. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get the string off here. Now, there's our last one. Well, you can see that this is beaut - it's regain - it's remain - what do I say? Retained all of its beautiful green, fresh texture and color. In other words, what the scientists would say, "All its nutrients are there," as well as its beauty. Now, if you want to keep it warm and you're not serving it immediately, you can just set it over your - over your hot water. You can

even put, uh, a towel over it but I think the sooner you eat it, the better. However, you can serve it warm or just lukewarm. Now we have our sauce, which has kept nicely. And be sure to try this sauce because it is just lovely with this asparagus and it's - I think if you - if you have asparagus every day in season the way I usually do, you like have a little change in sauces. And So now, we're ready to serve, if I can get these both together. There, and this asparagus is so beautiful that we're going to have it as a separate course - that's the way the French do. Because it's such a- a beautiful vegetable, it's just a shame to let it be

mixed up with anything else. So we have a large serving for each person and a beautiful dollop of that lovely sauce on. I think - I think that's - I think, really, when you get beautiful asparagus, I think it should be served as a separate course. You can either use it as the first course for a dinner party or as the - or instead of a salad course. But I want to show you about eating it. I like- This is my system, which I think is very good, which is to cut the tips off and leave them in a little pile and then cut the middle part. And then, I always start in with the butts first and just eat

them and then I eat all the middle part and then, I save the - I save the tips for the end. And then, I want to show you a French method in which you have the large pieces of asparagus. And the sauce. And then, you just pick it up and eat it in your hands. So really, what's nicer than a great big plate of fresh asparagus all by itself? It's the most marvelous way to begin the meal. And I think it's really - it's just irresistible. This picking it up in the fingers and dipping it all in - I really think this is the most elemental way of eating it. That's all for today on The French Chef. This is for Julia Child, who would, if she could, say Bon Appetit.

The French Chef has been made possible by a grant from Hills Bros. Coffee Incorporated. And by a grant from the Polaroid Corporation. Julia Child is co-author of the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. [THEME MUSIC PLAYS] You.