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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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  • Can you add links to some of the recipes, especially ones that include butter? – FuzzyChef May 15 '23 at 18:09
  • Also, suggestion: if you make this question exclusively about the butter (i.e. "Should I add butter to the water when cooking white asparagus") you'll get better quality answers. – FuzzyChef May 15 '23 at 18:10
  • @FuzzyChef I did not link any recipes because they're all in German and these components are ubiquitous in the recipes I found. And I intentionally made the question a bit broader to allow for more comprehensive answers, I'm not sure restricting it more would improve it. – Mad Scientist May 15 '23 at 20:52
  • I make my white asparagus (when i can find it) the same as I make my green. – Roddy of the Frozen Peas May 16 '23 at 22:37
  • I can‘t provide any hard scientific facts but I can think of three possibilities: 1) fat extract more of the bitterness (that you can stilll get if you cook asparagus shavings for too long) 2) you extract flavor for using the cooking liquid to make asparagus soup (also known practice by my grandparents, cooking the shavings with cooking liquid and more water or stock) or 3) the „Stich gute Butter“ was always added for good measure and never was questioned – jmk May 18 '23 at 10:40

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