Cooking With Ginger: Peeling, Cutting, Timing and Fresh vs. Ground

The best ginger peeler is already in your silverware drawer: the edge of a teaspoon. Fry fresh ginger early in hot oil and it turns mellow; add it late or raw and it stays sharp and bright.¹ Grate it to a fine pulp and the fibers won’t end up in your teeth. Ground ginger is a different ingredient with its own jobs, mostly in baking.

At a glance

Buying fresh ginger

Pick firm, heavy roots with smooth, taut skin, and pass on any that are shriveled, soft or moldy. Shriveling costs you flavor: America’s Test Kitchen notes that ginger loses pungency once it starts to shrivel and dry out.²

You may also see young ginger. Tasting Table says it’s harvested about eight months after planting and tastes mild and delicate with a floral sweetness, while mature ginger has real heat and thicker skin.⁴ Young ginger suits raw dishes and pickles where you want just a hint of heat. Mature ginger is the everyday supermarket root.

Peeling

ATK says to skip the paring knife and the vegetable peeler, which both take too much flesh. Instead, hold the ginger against the cutting board and scrape the thin brown skin off with the edge of a teaspoon. A curved spoon follows the knobs and gets around bends far more easily than a blade. Peel only the part you’re about to use, and hold the unpeeled end as a handle while you grate.²

Whether you need to peel at all depends on the dish. For coins you’ll fish out of a broth, many cooks leave the skin on.

Cutting it for the job

For bigger amounts, use a food processor or a rasp-style grater. Ginger is easier to grate frozen.²

When to add it

Heat changes ginger, and you can use that.

• Early, in hot oil. Katzer describes chopped ginger fried in oil trading its hot, spicy taste for a mellow, mild, rich flavor, and notes that northern Indian cooks use it this way as the base of sauces. Chinese cooking uses fresh ginger both boiled and fried.¹
• Cooked longer. Katzer also says cooking makes fresh ginger more pungent but less fresh-tasting.¹ The chemistry is in is ginger spicy?: heat converts some gingerols into shogaols.
• Late or raw. For the brightest, juiciest ginger flavor, add it at the end or don’t cook it at all, as in dressings and the sauce below.

Scallion-ginger sauce is a good example of ginger that’s barely scalded. In Andy Liang’s Food Network Kitchen recipe, 3 tablespoons of finely chopped ginger go into a heatproof bowl with 2 chopped scallions and 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 cup of neutral oil heated to about 375°F gets poured over and stirred. Sugar and white pepper finish it, and it’s served with white cut chicken (bai qie ji).⁵ The hot oil softens the raw edge without fully cooking the ginger.

Fresh, ground, pickled and preserved

Fresh and dried ginger don’t swap cleanly in every dish. The fresh root is essential to many Asian dishes, while the dried, powdered spice is more popular in European cooking, and ground ginger goes into processed foods, especially baked goods and desserts. Dried ginger tastes more aromatic than hot. For more on how drying changes the flavor, see fresh vs. ground ginger.

Ground ginger in baking

King Arthur Baking’s gingerbread cake uses 1 1/2 teaspoons of ginger with 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon each of cloves and nutmeg.⁶

Swapping fresh and ground

Ratio (Disputed): They’ll stand in for each other in a pinch, but published conversions disagree, and none of them explains where its number comes from. Per tablespoon of grated fresh ginger:

King Arthur also suggests mixing grated fresh ginger with the butter and molasses before they go into the batter.⁶ As on ginger substitutes, start low in a savory dish, around 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of ground per tablespoon of fresh, and taste after it simmers. Ground ginger is less bright than fresh, and the Spice House suggests a little citrus or pepper to make up for it.⁸

Storing what you don’t use

• Fresh, short term: Food Network keeps unpeeled ginger up to a month in the fridge and peeled ginger 2 to 3 weeks.¹⁰ ATK says a wrapped nub lasts only a few days in the fridge.² Those figures disagree, and none comes from a storage study.
• Fresh, longer: In ATK’s four-week test, peeled ginger kept its flavor frozen, or in vodka in the fridge; ginger kept in water turned mushy.³ Details are in how to store ginger and can you freeze ginger?.
• Ground: University of California Cooperative Extension gives ground spices about a year. The same release names air, light, moisture and heat as what speeds flavor loss, so keep the jar closed and away from the stove.¹¹ If it smells faint, it’s faded.

How much is too much?

In food amounts, ginger is a flavor question, not a safety one. Ginger taken by mouth can cause heartburn, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea and mouth or throat irritation, and NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health advises talking to a health care provider before using ginger if you take any medicine.¹² Those cautions come from research on ginger taken on purpose, mostly as supplements. If a dish has gone too far, see too much ginger.

Not yet measured

• How long fresh ginger keeps in a home refrigerator: published figures range from a few days to a month, with no study behind them.
• Why the four fresh-to-ground conversions differ; none of their sources says how it was reached.
• Whether peeling makes any measurable difference to flavor in cooked dishes.

Related

• Ginger
• Fresh ginger vs. ground ginger
• Is ginger spicy?
• Ginger substitutes
• Too much ginger
• How to store ginger and can you freeze ginger?
• Garlic vs. ginger, galangal vs. ginger and turmeric vs. ginger
• Chai spices