How to Deal with Ginger — The Thrifty Table

Jun 21

Jun 21 How to Deal with Ginger

Fresh ginger is soooo tasty, but it’s not the easiest spice to work with. It took me years to develop a method that saves me time while cooking and also helps me save money by conserving what I have before it spoils or dries out.

Two pounds of fresh ginger, ready for peeling and freezing

My husband and I love ginger. No. Delete that. My husband and I are ginger fanatics. If I have a recipe that calls for ginger, 90% of the time I double it. No, triple it. No, I don’t think I’d be going too far to say I quadruple it. Does this ever get me into trouble? I don’t think it ever has (though maybe my friends who I invite over for homemade Asian food are holding out on me). Regardless, given our predilection for gingery goodness, we like to keep fresh ginger around.

Dried ginger will do in a pinch, but there’s really nothing like fresh ginger in a recipe. I remember so often feeling a twinge of disappointment when I wanted to make stir fry (one of my go-to easy-and-cheap-and-healthy recipes…I’ll post about stir fry soon) and I did not have fresh ginger on hand. But this kind of let down has been banished solidly to my past. I always have ginger around now, and it never goes bad. Does this seem like a miracle to you? It does to me! I’ll tell you how I broke my kitchen ginger drought in this article.

But first, in an article about “dealing” with ginger, there are other implied problems with it, besides running out of it at inopportune times. Actually there are a couple. The first is time. Using it gouges into your prep time for a recipe. First you have to wash it, then you have to peel it, and then finally you can dissect it. All of this pre-prep prep kind of takes the “easy” out of my weekday stir fry experience.

The second problem with ginger is grating it. Almost all recipes ask you to grate ginger, and here’s my question: why? Warning: if your experience is anything like mine, your post-traumatic stress might start kicking in here. No matter the grater I’ve tried, at the beginning it seems to be going well; there’s ginger falling down below the grater. The piece in my hand seems to be disappearing. Then, there seems to be an issue. The ginger seems to be just sliding over the grater without grating. If I persist, I will end up with only ginger juice dripping down the grater, and a stringy mass on the end of the gingerroot slowly attaching itself to my grater, twining its tentacles into it like an octopus pulling in its prey. For those of you who have never done this, I don’t recommend it.

The solution I use to all of these gingery problems is to buy lots of ginger and freeze it. I will likely repeat this many times in this blog, but for eating well on a budget, you need to get to know your freezer. I’m still getting to know mine. I think her name is Charlotte, but I keep forgetting. I feel the relationship between ginger and my freezer is the best one I’ve learned about. Ginger takes very well to freezing. Maybe even the best of any food I’ve ever tried to freeze. Why?

You don’t need to maintain a texture with ginger, because it is chopped up in a recipe. It is not eaten in raw chunks except by rare ginger-crazy people (my husband and I are only fanatics, not crazy) or folks trying to solve other problems like motion sickness (really, a completely un-corroborated web site by the “Motion Sickness Guru” told me this was true, though more credible sources confirm its effectiveness at treating nausea; official NASA advice recommends other treatments as tested by their astronauts).
Freezing can actually improve the texture of ginger for cooking by making it softer and more pliable. This releases the juices more readily into whatever it is you’re cooking.
The harder texture when it is still frozen makes it easier to grate into a very fine texture.

Convinced yet? If not, there’s more. I like to buy my ginger at the Asian food store in town. Why? Because Asian food stores sell Asian ingredients for a fraction of the cost (and often stock greater variety/better quality) than the stores that are closer to where I live. You may find this is true for many types of ethnic cooking. One inch of ginger (inches being the official unit of ginger in recipes) from our Asian market is 6 cents. At King Sooper’s it’s 12 cents, and at Whole Foods it’s 19 cents (or 22 cents if you buy the pre-minced ginger in a jar). If I use fresh ginger twice a week (I use it more), the Asian market presents a yearly savings of $13.52 over Whole Foods. Ok, its not a enough for a new smart phone, but definitely a couple of lattes, and I like lattes.

The trouble is, the Asian store is a 15 minute drive eastward from our house out onto the flats by the airport. Though my yearly savings make it worth the gas, I don’t do this drive often, and never if I have a lack-of-ginger-in-my-kitchen emergency on a Thursday night. But, with the freezing trick, I can buy a couple of pounds when I’m getting low, and then freeze it all at once. That will keep me going for several months and save me some dimes.

Here’s what I do. I head to the Asian store on the weekend and then immediately spend some time (takes 25 minutes for 2 pounds of ginger) washing, peeling, and then slicing the ginger into 1 or 2-inch sections and freezing it.

I simply place 1 layer of the ginger pieces in quart-sized freezer bags, freeze it laying flat, and then I can easily tuck these handy packages into available freezer spaces.

Freeze your ginger in easy-to-use 1-inch blocks

Frozen ginger is easy to tuck into small places in your freezer

This method leaves you with piles of ginger peel. But the peel makes an excellent addition to tea, so I keep the cleanest bits of washed peels in the freezer as well. If you can brew your tea in a pot, simply add a few peels along with your tea. I particularly like it as an addition to green tea.

I’m not the only one who suggests freezing ginger. I picked up the tip that freezing ginger makes it easier to grate from Christine Gallary on thekitchn.com. She also suggests that if your root isn’t too wrinkly, you can skip the peeling part, especially if you decide to grate it. When I have tried this, it took forever and my thumb started to feel numb. If you like just a little bit of ginger in your recipes, this could work really well, but if you are a ginger fanatic like me, I suggest a different tactic: simply mince the ginger.

The fibrous strings inside of ginger are parallel to the growing axis

Slice it into thin rounds first (after defrosting, if it is frozen), across the strings which are parallel to the growing axis, so that you cut those nasty tentacles, and then mince the rounds.

Easy. And you don’t dirty an extra tool that you then have to wash! I actually prefer my ginger this way, because the little pieces in your stir fry, or whatever you are preparing, give you a nice little bite of spiciness now and again as you eat it. Sometimes I’ll even leave the ginger in larger chunks to get more bite. But like I said, my husband and I are a little fanatical that way.