San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Make asparagus feel sophisticated
A luxurious butter sauce with shallots is a debonair alternative to a leafy green salad
A great platter of freshly cooked asparagus is a delightful way to start a meal and also makes a handsome, almost debonair alternative to a leafy salad. This is especially true when those green spears are just cooked through, leaving them with a confident crisp-tender texture. (I don’t think a floppy spear ever charmed anyone.) Asparagus is also a great way to get a taste of spring with its graceful, grassy sweet flavor.
I like to make asparagus feel extra sophisticated by pairing it with a butter sauce called beurre blanc in French. Despite the refinement that “beurre blanc” might conjure, it’s actually a very simple sauce to whip up. It requires just a few ingredients: wine, vinegar (although I skip vinegar in my version), shallots and butter.
It all starts with reducing that wine; you’ll want a dry, crisp and hopefully higher acid white wine here like a Pinot Grigio or a bright, unoaked Chardonnay. This is the time to avoid a wine with too much flavor, because that flavor is going to concentrate and most likely distract from the asparagus.
Beurre blanc is in the emulsified butter sauce category, and a lovely stray from just melted butter. Besides being delicious and rich, this sauce has a fuller mouthfeel that really cloaks the asparagus. It also has air pockets, so despite being mostly butter, it feels and tastes lighter.
One of the most simple and also French ways to cook asparagus is to plunge the spears into boiling, salted water until they are barely cooked through. It’s what I do here, and in general it’s a very efficient way to cook asparagus. If you opt for a shallow water bath like I do, it happens extra quickly because the water comes to a boil in a flash. I also find a shallow bath versus a big pot of water to be less wasteful, with more than sufficient elbow room to blanch one bunch at a time.
Once the asparagus is done cooking, I return to the reduced wine and shallots. I whisk cold butter in batches, so it’s easier to whisk. The mixture quickly becomes this thick, creamy sauce that doesn’t feel fatty like just melted butter, but rather a more poised and composed sauce, ready to be spooned over that asparagus.