Pickled Ginger

Young ginger sliced thin and dressed in a sweet vinegar, ready to eat the same afternoon.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 250 g young ginger, the kind with thin pale skin
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 200 ml rice vinegar
• 4 tablespoons sugar

Method

1. Use young ginger if you can get it. Old ginger has tough fibres running through it that no amount of pickling will soften, and the slices end up stringy.
2. Scrape the skin off with the back of a spoon rather than peeling it — on young ginger the skin comes away in flakes and you lose almost nothing.
3. Slice it as thin as you can manage, across the fibres. A vegetable peeler or a mandoline does this better than a knife.
4. Toss the slices with the salt and leave them 30 minutes, then squeeze out the liquid with your hands. This is what keeps them crisp instead of limp.
5. Warm the vinegar and sugar together until the sugar has dissolved, then pour it over the ginger while it is still hot. The heat sets the colour: young ginger will go faintly pink on its own.
6. Leave it to cool, then refrigerate. It is good after three or four hours and keeps a couple of months in the fridge.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes