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The recipes for cooking white asparagus (the kind popular in Germany, not the green one) add a few things to the water for cooking that seem a bit odd to me. Typical recipes use some or all of the following ingredients

  • salt
  • sugar
  • lemon juice
  • butter

Salt I understand of course. The lemon juice is supposed to affect the color or prevent discoloration, which seems plausible enough. I'm not sure about the sugar, the asparagus didn't really taste bitter or so without it. But the ingredient that makes me wonder the most is the butter.

Adding butter to the cooking water here seems similar to the often discredited advice to put olive oil in the water for cooking pasta. Oil and water don't really mix, so adding butter seems unlikely to affect the flavor of the asparagus a lot. So it seems like this would be a waster of butter for no or minimal effect. And it seems even more pointless as you typically add a far superior butter delivery device like Sauce Hollondaise to white asparagus.

Are there good reasons to add these ingredients, especially the butter?

Mad Scientist
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1 Answers1

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Without knowing the specific recipes, I'd say they all seem to be added just for flavour. While I would never boil asparagus, I could see any or all of these as ingredients to a recipe that includes asparagus. Or, are you sure that the recipes say boil? Maybe they meant for you to braise the asparagus. By the way, fun fact; white asparagus is just asparagus that hasn't been exposed to light. In Germany they have huge fields with rows of what looks like white tubes, that are covered asparagus.

ov suvajac
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