How to Prep Fresh Artichokes

Michele Knaus offers some surprising tips how to prepare artichokes for cooking. I know it's made my artichokes better to eat!

Michele Knaus: This is Artichoke flower, it’s been cut off half it’s stem, and what we need to do is prep it, so that it’s edible. Now an Artichoke is part of the fossil family and it has some characteristic, fissile, poky pieces on here, which you can absolutely stab yourself with. So you want to be careful when you pick it out and when you are working with it and you also want to take off any of those little thorny pieces, so that when you eat it, it’s a non-issue. So, the first thing that I would like to do is start with pair of kitchen shares. I have a spear specifically for the kitchen; I’ll wash them, keep them in the kitchen and use them pretty much for food only. If you only have one pair of scissors in the house to sanitize it in the sink and use that, but these are good, they are nice and heavy duty. And what I do is, I go through and I cut the very tips half of each of these major outside leaves around the side of it because that is where the little thorny piece is. Now once I’ve gotten most of those tips cut off, to prep it for eating. What you want to do is take off the out most layer of leaves. So that first level around the outside because those are really tough, there is hardly neat flesh on them and you not going to want to eat them anyway. Al right, so once you’ve got that first layer off, you want to prep this down. Now some people just prep the stem off and don’t deal with at all, but it actually has a really tendered, delicious flavor so, I’m going to pull out my trustee peeler rather than take a knife to it and just peel it like a cucumber. Now the other thing with the stem is really good for, is as a way of telling when this artichoke is tendered, when you are cooking at. So, if you puffed off, it’s a lot how that artichoke is done, so leave it on there now we can give it a good band and see if those tendered or not. Now in order to get into the inside of this artichoke to continue to prep it, the easiest thing that I feel is just take the whole top off, that’s when the big knife comes out. Okay, so that will open this up, so that we can actually see into the middle and that’s what we were going for because there is what’s called a choke from the artichoke named, it’s in the middle here. And if, I were not to pick this, if I were to just leave this on the plant and let it grow, it’s going to blue into really beautiful purple, spiky flowers and those flowers in a dormant stage are still in here and they are completely inedible, they are just tough and they don’t feel good, they don’t piece good, so we have to give that out. Al right. So, the best to way to get in here, is to just sort of fry it open with your fingers, and as you do that you’ll see lighter colored leaves on the inside like yellowish and they are much tenderer and softer to the touch. And then, in the middle there is sort of a purplish piece; Now if you are lucky you can reach in pull that out. But really what you want to do to make your life a little easier, is grapefruit spoon that kind of has a little serrated edge to it because then you can really get in there and just get those flower pieces out of there not interested in them and here is what they look like, they are just sort of you know little fissile pieces, they don’t have any flavor like I said and they are kind of not a pleasant texture in your mouth. Now all of these little pieces that I’m pulling out and the little leaf parts actually had some pretty nice flavors as to the tips in the skin and everything that I could cut off, so what I’ll do is, I’ll actually make a little stock with that and you know follow it up with some artichoke soup or maybe I want to make sauce to go long with my pesto. So, I’m a big fan of not throwing anything away, composite at the very at least, but if there is a way that you can extract some more flavor out of it by making a stock, I’m offer that; so let’s see, there we go. I’ve got a nice cleaned inside, so this is the point at which you would steam it, if you were going to steam it whole, if you are going to stuff it and then steam it now you made yourself a cavity that’s perfect for putting whatever you want in it. If you are going to do several of these that’s when your bowl of lemon water comes in handy because now that this is been cut, it’ll oxidize and turn little brown, so always put a cut side down in lemon water to hold rather than I go on to prep the rest of my artichokes. Let’s say, I wanted to steam this, I would have all my artichokes ready, I would have my steaming basket. So, these can just set in here. You can actually, stack them on top of each other, if you are steaming a whole lot of artichokes; there is still resilient enough even after they have cooked that they won’t necessarily have a problem with bean stat. The little stem works nicely has a handle to at least when you are putting them in. Once you’ve cooked them, the stem should be tendered, so you don’t want to pick it up by the stem or you’ll loose it. It generally takes 20, 30 minutes to cook a whole artichoke depending on the size and how many you have in there? So, you just make sure you have plenty of water in your steamer and just keep checking it, just keep fill in the stem or if you want to use toothpick to see if the stem is tendered, feel free to poke it. And then when it’s steamed ready to go with a little bit of like, lemon, butter and salt and delicious.