(dramatic music)
- Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to Serious Eats at Home.
I am not at home.
I am in a different home than my last video
because I am house sitting and I have a little more space,
a little more kitchen space, and I am cooking today,
a little trick for cooking vegetables.
It's like a really quick way to get
a nice side dish on the table
in the time that you would, say, rest a steak.
All you'll really need is a cast iron or carbon steel pan
and some nice fresh vegetables.
This is a method that I use all the time
for charring vegetables,
like asparagus or cabbage or snap peas,
depending on the time of year.
Today, I am charring asparagus.
Before cooking the asparagus,
I seared off this bavette steak
in just a little bit of vegetable oil over high heat,
turning every so often till I got a nice sear.
And it's just out of the pan and resting.
So we're going to use the same carbon steel pan
that we used to cook the steak to cook the asparagus.
And that's what's really nice about this method of cooking,
is that you're able to cook your side dish
in the time that it takes for your meat to rest,
if you're cooking a steak or a chop or something like that,
and you get to use the same pan.
So it's kind of that like one pan meal type deal,
but you're not cooking everything all at the same time.
The asparagus will cook really quickly
and we're going to go into a dry pan.
So the steak was cooked with a little bit of oil.
After it came out of the pan,
I just gave it a quick rinse and then got it going
over high heat with no fat whatsoever in the pan.
For cooking the asparagus itself,
all I did was trimmed off the very ends.
So oftentimes you'll hear people talk about
break it between your, hold it and break it,
and where it breaks is where it's supposed to be.
Oftentimes you end up wasting a bunch of asparagus that way.
You really just need to cut the sort of
half inch or so off the bottom.
Not all asparagus spears will cook at the same rate.
Got little thin ones and big, big, big boys over here.
You know, we just got to cook them at different times.
So I've just separated the really thin spears
from the really thick ones.
And we'll just cook them differently.
I'll just start with the thick ones.
So we're cooking over medium high to high heat,
depending on the size of your burners.
You're seeing some smoke come off the pen right now.
That's just a little bit of residual oil
from cooking the steak.
You can wipe that out with a towel.
So going in with the asparagus,
and you just want to get it in a single layer.
And then try and get as much even contact
with the pan as possible.
If you had like the Chef's Press weights
that I really like using for cooking,
this would be a great moment to use them,
press down on them,
make sure that you're getting even contact,
but you could even use something, you know, like a,
a nice little can of tomatoes or something like that.
Make sure that you're not totally crushing your asparagus.
And what we're looking to do is
to get nice even char on the spears on one side
and then we'll flip them over.
With the thin ones, you'll probably end up just cooking,
just charring them on one side
because you'd end up overcooking them
if you tried to char both.
No fat in the pan,
also no salt or pepper right now in the pan.
If you've ever cooked asparagus, you probably know that
salt has a little trouble adhering to asparagus.
You just sort of throw it in there,
it bounces right back off.
And you kind of need fat to be in there with the asparagus
in order for salt to adhere to it.
So we are going to wait to season the asparagus
until the end, when we add some fat to the pan.
And once in a while,
you can just sort of check how things are developing
with your char, looking good.
And you'll notice as the asparagus cooks,
it'll start to get more vibrantly green.
I hate when you get asparagus and it's all droopy and sad.
For me, asparagus, when you cook it,
it should just start to like bend under its own weight.
And we'll see what that looks like in a second.
Oh yeah, some of these are really nice.
You see how, like, when we started, it was like this
and it's just starting to come, droop down a little bit.
So we're real close.
And it's not going to be the same for everyone.
See this one's so thick, it's going to take a little longer.
Once the asparagus is charred on both sides,
you're getting that nice droopy action where you want it,
you're just going to go in with a touch of vegetable oil
and then we'll toss and season with salt and pepper as well.
So, working quickly, just a touch of oil in the pan.
Season with some salt.
Pepper.
And out.
And now we're going to move on to the thinner ones.
Cooking these less because, you know, they're thinner,
they're going to cook faster.
So we're really going to just char them on one side.
Again, get your carbon steel pan ripping hot,
no oil in the pan, and same process.
You can weigh them down again.
These are thinner, so going with a super heavy weight
like the can of tomatoes that I was using before
might not be the best idea now
because I don't want to damage these asparagus spears.
I'm just going to press on them with my hands.
You can use tongs, back your hand, or whatever.
Because there's no fat in the pan,
there's no risk of fat splattering up and burning you.
As long as you don't touch the pan itself, you'll be fine.
These aren't all the same size, even for thin ones.
This one, much thinner than this one.
What you can do is either start
with the thicker ones in the pan and then add the thin ones
to make sure they cook at the right rate,
or you can just take the thin ones out for a second
while you let the slightly thicker ones finish cooking,
and then you'll get them back in
to finish cooking at the end.
We're getting that droop that we were talking about.
Perfect.
So we'll get the small ones back in.
Touch of oil.
Little shake, salt, just a little bit,
tiny bit of pepper, and out, that's it.
All you have to do now, slice your steak,
plate up your asparagus, again, you don't need steak.
You can just have nice charred asparagus
with a sauce of your choosing.
For this one, I'm using a nice little chimichurri
that I made with some herbs
that I picked up at the farmer's market.
Because it's summer,
I don't want to cook and have another sauce
that I have to worry about that's hot.
So I'm looking for like low lift, easy sauces.
I really love eating asparagus this way.
Still got some flex to it, it's not hammered,
it's not shrivelly, super, super soggy or anything.
And it's just a really simple, nice little side dish
that you can put together, a weeknight, on the weekends,
you just don't wanna, right now,
I don't want to be spending a ton of time on side dishes.
And the key is that we didn't overcook the asparagus.
I can't explain enough, to me,
I really don't like overcooked asparagus.
And this is really nice.
You can tell, the color's still vibrant and green,
it's still got nice chew to it,
but it's not raw or anything.
And I just threw some across the room, perfect.
Don't put that on the video, Joel.
(crew member laughing)
Cut.