Vegetables
Asparagus
Six minutes, 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 a six-minute vegetable 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 — Whole spears, six minutes at 200°C, with the tips done first.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.