How to Peel, Mince, Grate and Store Fresh Ginger

Welcome to the new page on my blog titled Tips & Tricks.  This is my first entry, and hopefully, not my last!

Fresh ginger.

Long since touted as a medicinal food, it recently has been lab tested and shown to kill ovarian cancer cells, ease stomach discomfort, and when tested on lab mice, to heal skin cancer.

It’s become one of my favorite ingredients lately.  I love it chopped in a hunk and thrown in my tea pot to steep with some loose-leaf chamomile tea. You don’t even need to peel it, just let the tea basket do it’s work and then discard it.  Try this for a tummy settling hot tea that relaxes you as well.

But what to do when a recipe calls for minced ginger?  Or grated fresh ginger?

I’ve tried many ways.

I’ve tried using my peeler.  Too many nooks and crannies to get to.

I’ve tried the old “use a spoon to scrape the skin off” method.

Too messy, too long, too many of my knuckles got scraped by that doggone spoon.

I hate scraped knuckles

This is the method I’ve found to be the easiest.

First, take a knife and cut off one of the sections of the ginger.

See this one? You can kind of eyeball it and see that you can make this sort of a straight piece with a little help.

Now take your knife, and keeping as close as you can to the peel. slice off to make a straight line along one edge.

Keep doing so on the other three sides of the piece.

Now, there’s a little bend in that piece so I actually chopped it and the bend to make two kind of, well….sort of rectangular pieces.

Remember, flat sides are our friends.  It makes for good dicing and mincing.

Now, with one of these, I’ll show you how to dice the ginger.

Start by slicing very thinly down one side of the ginger.

Try to make the slices really thin.

Then flip your ginger over one 90º  turn so that all those slices you made are on the sides now.  On the uncut flat side, again make the same size slices through the ginger again.

Now you should have a bunch of lines of matchstick pieces of ginger all still in the rectangle form you started with.

Turn them around and slice the other way across them to make tiny cubes.

Congratulations! You just minced ginger!

Simple huh?

Now for the second piece of ginger.  Take a Microplane grater, zester or box grater, and rub the piece over it.

And please make sure your nails aren’t half polished due to sanding door frames at our youth pastor’s house like mine are.

Tada!   Grated ginger!

You’re a star!

Sometimes you have to scrape the ginger off the other side. It’s ornery that way.

And here’s the cool thing.

The best way to store fresh ginger for a long time?

Your freezer.

Put your cut, peeled pieces into a freezer bag, squeezing out as much air as possible before sealing.

Pop that baby into the freezer.  It grates even better when frozen.  Anytime you need fresh ginger, just pop out a square, and grate away baby.

Cooking with Love,

~Katie