At different stages of this recipe, you can make everything in the title of this post. I got the idea from reading Alton Brown's candied ginger recipe. Today was just a test batch, so I used a pretty small amount of fresh ginger. I don't have a digital food scale, so the amount of ginger used is just an approximation. You can save the peeled ginger skin to flavor broths and steam shellfish and/or seafood, like fish and crab.
Ingredients
1/4 pounds of fresh ginger, peeled
1/2 c. organic granulated sugar
1/2 c. filtered water
Directions
I recommend this order of operations because you can see how much water is really needed to make the syrup. Alton's method would have you use equal portions of ginger, water, and sugar. But I'm not comfortable with boiling such a small quantity of ginger for so long in so little water.
1. Slice the peeled ginger slightly larger than 1/8" and less than 1/4" thick. I found that 1/8" thick slices come out really small after the cooking process.
2. In a small pot, add ginger slices and sugar. Then add the water.
3. Bring to a boil and stir frequently. Let simmer for 20 minutes or until the water has nearly evaporated and the ginger is tender.
When the liquid has reduced by half, the ginger syrup is ready to be put into other sauces, on top of breads, or on ice cream.
4. Carefully remove the ginger to a drying rack that has been placed over a pie dish or parchment paper-lined baking tray. This will catch the residual ginger syrup which will eventually crystallize into sugar.
5. Let the ginger cool, then store in an airtight container for a couple weeks.
6. The scrape out the leftover syrup/sugar from the pot and let it dry on the same rack. As the water evaporates, what you'll have left is ginger-flavored sugar. This can be mixed in with more sugar, if you like. Store the ginger sugar in a separate airtight container. This, like vanilla sugar, keeps for quite a while in the pantry.
