Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Mise en Place – Chopped Ginger ready in your freezer
If your kitchen and pantry are well stocked, you’ll never have a need for Rachel Ray and her 30 Minute Meals. Plus, you’ll save a load of cash by not buying preprepared food [not always a bad thing], and probably be a lot healthier for it.
Today’s tip is about ginger; one of my favourite ingredients. Ginger is relatively cheap, packs both heat and aromatics, and can be used for many, many dishes. Candy it for desserts, make a healthful tea, add fresh to make spectacular gingerbread, curries, soups, or pretty much anything. If you want to know more about ginger, well, there’s always Wikipedia.
Fresh Ginger, unpeeled
If you’ve never picked up a fresh ginger root before, there’s not a whole lot to know. Fresh, it may keep unrefrigerated for a week, two in the crisper drawer of your fridge. In both cases you’ll notice it drying out, slowly losing flavour, turning brown, and even going moldy. To preserve ginger, and always on hand, prechop and freeze it.
Peeling Ginger with a Spoon
Ginger is fibrous, and has a thin brown skin which is easily peeled off with the side of a spoon.
Since ginger is quite fibrous, cut it into manageable pieces. If you don’t, the ‘hairs’ may be long, and tangle around the blades of your food processor. They also don’t break down very easily when cooked, so may be mistaken for human hairs in your finished dish [eek!]. Throw the peeled and chopped ginger it into your trusty food processor. If you don’t have one, chop like mad. But then seriously consider getting a cheap food processor. Both Cuisinart and Black and Decker make reliable, miniature models that retail for around $25.
Chopped Ginger
Your chopped ginger can be packaged in an airtight container and refrigerated for about a week, or frozen for 6 months or more. Ginger freezes very well. If you make a lot of Indian dishes, you can always let the food processor go longer and save ginger paste instead.
Small, 150g packages of frozen chopped ginger are starting to appear in supermarkets here in Vancouver. I really don’t understand who the market for these convienience products is. Ginger is around $0.85 a pound, and less than 10 minutes of work to process several pounds at once. Do it yourself, and you’ll save a bundle.
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