Why the bend-and-break trick isn't the most effective way to cut asparagus.
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Frugal Family Home | 2019-11-16 12:00:00 | 36,284 Views |
The best way to prune asparagus
Every spring the editors of Serious Eats go nuts for asparagus. There’s no better time to eat asparagus when the stalks are at their sweetest with a bold clean grassy flavor that seems to sweep the remnants of winter deprivation from your taste buds.
Asparagus spears are notorious for their tender tips and hard woody ends so almost every recipe you find online will start with trimming off those tough bottoms before cooking. Many sources will tell you that asparagus has a built-in natural breaking point: Hold a spear up horizontally and snap off the end where you see it start to droop—or even easier bend it in your hands yourself and it will snap right where you want it to. So you bend and break! It’s almost as if that asparagus wants to be trimmed.
The problem is that this approach isn’t really any better or faster than the more obvious method: cutting off the ends of a bunch of spears in one go. This is something that many professional and non-professional chefs have learned through experience but the shadow of bending and breaking still hangs heavy over conventional cooking wisdom.