Vegetables
Asparagus
A few minutes at most, and the tips will be done well before the stems.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
The taper is everything. A spear's tip is thin, loosely structured and mostly water, and it browns and then burns while the woody base is still tough. Nothing about the cooking fixes this; snapping off the woody end before cooking does. Beyond that, asparagus behaves like most thin green vegetables — fast, high surface area, no fat, and prone to being lifted by the fan when there is not much in the basket.
Why the cut matters
Asparagus is one of the quickest vegetables in the charts, with a built-in unevenness problem: the tip is fine and delicate and the base of the stem is fibrous, and they are the same piece of food.
Cooking pages
- Asparagus spears — Fresh asparagus gets twelve to sixteen minutes at 180°C in one manufacturer's table; two others print six to seven minutes at 200°C without naming a state.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.