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Ask the Expert: Maggie Gilbert
How to prepare artichokes – UHC TV
I got a question about artichokes. Someone said I’m a little intimidated when I see them at the grocery store, so how do I prepare them? Great question. Artichokes are intimidating. They are a member of the thistle family, and they have little, sharp spikes on them. I’m going to show you how to get rid of those, how to cook them, and get the choke out really, really quickly.
When you buy it, it pretty much looks like this. This is a nice one because the leaves are nice and tight on it. The first thing you are going to want to do is trim it. I’m going to take a little bit of the stem, and the stem is actually part of the heart of the artichoke which is a really great part to eat. So, I don’t really like to trim it down too far unless I’m going to stand it up to serve it, in which case I would cut it flat. Then, the next thing you do is take a nice, sharp knife, lay the artichoke on its side, and cut off about the top inch. So, we are just going to go like this, and boom. Cut that off, so we’ll get rid of those. And then the final thing for trimming is to take a scissors, and you’ll see this a lot if you see pictures of artichokes in magazines. It really does make it nice and get rid of all the points. You just take a scissors and dig in and cut straight across the leaves—the ones that are exposed—just like this. I’ll just do a few to kind of get you the idea. Just cut right across. Find all the ones that are exposed, and cut right across. We would just continue around and keep doing that, and then, we would be all ready to cook.
In terms of cooking an artichoke, you can steam them, you can put them in boiling water—either way works just fine. They take awhile to cook depending on the size. It might take thirty minutes. It might take forty-five or fifty. You just want to do it until you can stick a knife down through the heart and they’re nice and tender and it slips out. Because you want these cooked pretty thoroughly. I usually add a little bit of vinegar and salt to the water when I’m cooking them. They are still going to turn this army green. You first put them in and they get bright green, but when they are really cook through, they are going to turn this color and it kind of cant be helped.
So, now I have my artichoke that I’ve cooked, and that I’ve trimmed ahead of course. Now you want to get the choke out, and the way to do that—the choke by the way is this kind of fuzzy part way down in the middle and is not pleasant to eat at all, so you definitely want that removed. I’m just going to start to work the leaves apart like this. You can see down there, and I’m going to take my hand and I’m going to just try to pull out some of those leaves. I might need a spoon to get me started here. Yeah. These will lift out just fine. I’m going to lift this piece out and set it aside. Now, you can kind of see there’s a little fuzzy part down in there. So, I’m just going to take a spoon and start scraping. All I have to do is pull it and scrape it out. I’ll just take a little out to show you what it starts looks like. It’s kind of hairy and furry, and you just want to pop it out. Here, I’ve got a little bit I can show you. It looks kind of like this. See, it’s all a little bit prickly and again wouldn’t be pleasant to eat. You just want to work it and work it until you pull that middle part out.
Once that’s out, the way you eat it is you pull the outer leaves out—like this, dip them in something yummy—like a little bit of melted butter would be good, and then you just scrape them. So, you are just eating—you really aren’t eating this whole leaf. You are just scraping it with your teeth and eating the tender part. And then, when you get to the bottom part of it, and I’ll see if I can do this here. Let’s say we’ve eaten all this and pulled all the leaves off, and I still got a little choke that I would normally have taken off. I can keep working. But, under this choke is this most delicious heart, and it’s really, really delicious. It’s the best part. Again, you can dip that in a little butter, slice it up and sauté it, put it in salads. It’s wonderful. That’s the part you get to after you’ve done all the work to prep the artichoke. They’re easy. They’re fun. They take just a couple of minutes to prep. So grab a couple of artichokes, and give them a try.
