Plum Jam with Whiskey and Ginger

In this batch, I set aside two 8 oz freezer jars to see what this stuff tastes like on toast and/or pbj sandwiches. The jam didn't set in the water bath and spreads easily enough after being refrigerated. And no, pectin was not used. And no, it didn't set like a normal jam where equal portions of sugar and fruit purée were used. If I made this again, I'd omit the whiskey/bourbon. It tastes good with peanut butter without the whiskey. The ingredient ratio comes from the My Friday Food Swings blog.

TheFoodening Blog: plum ginger jam ready to eat

3 lbs Italian plums (dark purple skin, yellow flesh), pit removed
2 1/2 c organic granulated sugar
2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 c fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp ground ginger
1/2 c whiskey or bourbon, any plain variety

Directions

1. Wash and quarter the plums, removing the pits. Place plums in a large bowl and mix with 1/2 c sugar, salt, and lemon juice. Store in refrigerator overnight.

2. Cook plums, its juices, and remaining sugar in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat for 15 minutes. If you're going to strain out the skins, do so at this point, otherwise use an immersion blender and purée it all smooth. Stir frequently or the jam will burn. Add ginger powder and cook for an additional 15 minutes.

As you boil the plums with the sugar, don't be alarmed by the not-red color this produces before using the immersion blender.

At this point, I reserved a cup of jam, letting it cool in a bowl before transferring it to a freezer jar.

3. Add the whiskey, if using, and boil for an additional 3 minutes.

4. Process using hot jam in hot sterilized jars/bands/lids in a hot water bath for 15 minutes.

Made: 2 half-pint freezer jars + 4 half-pint jars

Homemade Pickled Ginger / Gari

Young ginger is a summer season ingredient; so it's best to pick it up fresh at your local Asian grocery store that has it before summer ends. I picked this up from Portland's Fubonn Asian supermarket on the southeast side of the metro. Inexpensive, for what it is. Though, I'm not going to break even on cost with preparing it into pickled ginger compared to what it costs already prepared. At least it won't have any of that nasty pink food coloring.

I made it from this recipe ratio from Just One Cookbook and let's just say that I'm very disappointed in the thinness that a Cook's Illustrated top recommended mandoline has done with these ginger slices. I could have sliced them thinner with a knife. They taste OK, though, more like ginger pickles than the pickled ginger you'd eat with sushi. There was no pink to the young ginger to begin with, so these didn't turn a shade of pink while fermenting. In fact, they are of a light brown color.

TheFoodening Blog: pickled ginger, ready to eat

Ginger Salad Dressing

This recipe tries to replicate the house-made ginger salad dressing that one can usually find with a Japanese restaurant's entree or bento salad. It comes together fairly easily; though you will have to procure or make-from-scratch a couple of the ingredients.

Yes, there is such a thing as toasted sesame oil and you can buy it in any grocery store that also stocks Asian goods. In the Portland or Seattle areas, Whole Foods and Uwajimaya definitely carries both oils. Read the ingredient label since not all brands carry pure sesame oil--where it is the only ingredient. You could also make it yourself by using toasting white sesame seeds before grinding it into an oil; though that takes special kitchen equipment to extract the oil from the seeds. That is too much trouble. Just buy the stuff.

Making your own sushi ginger is fairly simple, if you can get your hands on fresh young ginger. Sometimes

Ingredients

50 gm pickled sushi ginger
1/4 c toasted sesame oil
1 tbsp soy sauce

Directions

Purée until smooth using an standard electric blender or immersion blender. Serve over fresh greens or roasted vegetables.

Chanterelle and Ginger Soup

Warm and earthy, this soup really hits the spot on a very chilly autumn day. This is a mostly clear broth. The chicken broth could probably swapped out for a vegetarian broth, if you prefer.

Serves: 4

Ingredients

1 quart homemade chicken broth
2 organic celery ribs, diced
1 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
1/2 lb fresh chanterelles, cleaned and halved

Directions

Bring broth to a boil. Add celery, ginger, and chanterelles. Simmer until the celery is fork tender. about 15 minutes.

Serve hot.

Kitchen Notes: Ginger Beer, batch #2

I made another half-gallon batch of this today using bread yeast instead of champagne yeast. I'll find out in a couple of days if the type of yeast has any impact on the taste. You cannot use bread yeast when making hard apple cider, for example, unless you want your cider to taste like apple bread.

From the first batch, the first liter was drunk 2 days after I transferred the brew from the 1-gallon jug to the two 1-liter glass bottles. It was sweet and had a very strong ginger kick to it. The best part was the carbonation. Nice and fizzy. The second bottle was drunk a week after racking and it wasn't as sweet. It had some carbonation and it might have bordered on being slightly alcoholic. Nonetheless it's a fun experiment.

Ginger Beer

After the disastrous episode of making hard cider from scratch (came out tasting flat and very, very dry), I thought I would try my hand at making some ginger beer. I hope there is still some oomph left in the leftover champagne yeast. It's been lurking in a ziplocked bag in the fridge for about a year. This batch will presumably make 2 liters, which is good since I have two one-liter flip-top glass bottles.

If everything goes right, ginger beer in 2-3 days.

The ingredient ratio comes from The Roasted Root. 

Ingredients

1/4 c fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 c fresh lemon juice (1-2 lemons)
1 c cane sugar (add additional 1/4 c sugar if you enjoy a sweeter ginger beer)
1 tsp active dry yeast or champagne yeast
4 cups of filtered water + 5 cups of cold filtered water
One 2-liter plastic bottle with a screw top or a 1-gallon carboy with an S-curve airlock

Directions

Start by adding ginger, cream of tartar, and lemon juice to an 8-quart stock pot. 

Add 4 cups of chlorine-free filtered water. Bring to a boil and add sugar. Boil until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and add remaining 5 cups of chlorine-free filtered water.

Wait until the liquid temperature is between 75-100 degrees F. Then, add the yeast and stir.

Cover and let rest in a dark place for 3 hours. I just covered the pot with its lid and stuck it into the oven. Seems dark enough in there.

Use a fine strainer and pour liquid into a 5-quart bowl, to remove the small bits of ginger.

Use a funnel to fill the carboy. Fill airlock with water and attach to carboy. Place carboy in a dark, warm room.

Wait 2 days (sweeter), or 3 days (drier).

Once the beer has finished brewing (e.g., airlock stops releasing CO2), transfer to glass bottles with flip-top lids and store in the refrigerator. This slows the fermentation process and be careful when opening the bottles. 

Chilled Ginger-Watermelon Soup

I made palate cleanser appetizer for a House of Hsi dinner party (think formal meal prep and casual atmosphere). It relies entirely on the sweetness of the watermelon and the subtle heat of the ginger as the only ingredient flavorings. The peppermint mint leaves were just for garnish. There is no added sugar; mostly because watermelons are very sweet at the end of summer. Because the size of the bowls that were used held less than a cup of soup each, the portion sizing of this recipe is an estimate. If you have a water pitcher that can fit (covered) in the refrigerator, it'll make pouring this appetizer really easy.

Serves: 12+

Ingredients

One medium seedless watermelon, cut into chunks
36 watermelon balls, chilled
One 1" x 1/2" peeled fresh ginger root, grated with a ginger grater
2 fresh mint leaves per bowl (optional, as garnish)

Directions

1. In a large 5-quart bowl, use an immersion blender to blend the watermelon chunks, grated ginger, and ginger juice together. Transfer to a serving pitcher and chill for at least an hour before serving.

2. Using a melon baller, scoop out rounded balls of watermelon. Cover and chill in the refrigerator before serving.

3. To plate this, place three watermelon balls inside the soup bowl. Fill the bowl until the balls are barely covered by the soup. Garnish with mint leaves and serve.

Ginger Sugar, Candied Ginger, and Ginger Syrup

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.

Pickled Ginger

Ever buy a stub of fresh ginger from the grocery store and end up using it in just one or two dishes, then look in horror as it gets all shriveled in the fridge or on the counter by the garlic? Well, here is a way to add another month of life to the ginger. At sushi restaurants, I used to nibble on the pickled ginger with a bit of wasabi mustard and some soy sauce, though not as a palate cleanser, but simply to eat it. I haven't been able to slice it thin enough at home to replicate the ginger you get at the store or restaurant. Maybe I need a much sharper knife than the RADA knife I picked up last year. I am avoiding artificial colorants. The pink tinge can be added naturally by boiling a small red beet with the vinegar before adding the ginger to the pickling liquid.

Another way to keep the essence of ginger around is to peel the fresh ginger root and slice it into long, thin matchsticks. Then dry the ginger and keep it as a dried spice in a glass jar. I've found this also works pretty well when cooking up clear broths, steaming seafood, and to add to meat-based stews when I've run out of fresh ginger. Nothing tastes quite like fresh ginger and the flavor is far more mild after it's been dried.

At some point I would like to procure a small ceramic ginger grater. I saw it once at the Portland Home & Garden show a couple years ago, and now I can't find it anywhere. It's used in Asian cuisine a lot to get fresh ginger juice from grated ginger. Onto the recipe...

Ingredients

1/2 lb fresh ginger root, peeled and thinly sliced
1/3 c. rice vinegar
2 tbsp cooking mirin
2 tbsp sake (dry and of drinking quality, but not fusion-flavored or carbonated)
2 tbsp organic granulated sugar or brown sugar

Directions

1. Scrub the ginger under water with a mushroom brush or the rough side of a sponge to remove all the dirt. Blanch it in boiling water for a minute or so, then drain.

2. Combine the cooking mirin, sake, and sugar in a small pot and bring it to a boil until the sugar dissolves. To alter the natural beige color of the ginger to a pinkish color, you could add a small red beet in this step. Let cool.

3. In a clean, sterilized jar add the ginger and pour the vinegar over the ginger. Cover the jar and use the ginger within a week, or up to a month if kept in a refrigerator.