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Over the holidays, as I was offering a friend a slice of gingerbread cake topped with a creamy layer of buttermilk frosting and little bits of crystallized ginger and sugared cranberries, she rolled her eyes, and said “Of course you make fresh gingerbread and candy your own ginger.” The aggressively dismissive attitude took me by surprise, and I felt like it was part of a whole anti-home cooking backlash that seemed to take firm hold in popular culture late last fall which I will rant about at length later. As it happened, I hadn’t actually made the items in question from scratch — the loaf of gingerbread had been procured at the greenmarket, the ginger was from a Trader Joe’s run, and the cranberries had come from a goodie bag, all I did was whip up the frosting that held them all together. [Sidebar: I do love me a good frosting, and this one is super quick: Beat together 1 cup of softened butter, 32 ounces of powdered sugar, 5 tablespoons buttermilk, a squeeze of lemon juice, a splash of vanilla, and until it is a little fluffy and very creamy.]
I noticed that my friend’s snark at my perceived Martha-ness did not get in the way of her scarfing down several pieces of said cake, and I was about to bark back myself, but as I am not a Real Housewife, party confrontations are not my jam, so instead I counted to ten and walked away. Also I would have made a terrible debater at that moment because I had become completely consumed and distracted by the idea that I SHOULD be making my own candied ginger.
I use a considerable amount of candied ginger. A lot. I fold it into oatmeal, batters, and yogurt, toss it into salads and pilafs, stir it into teas and toddys, and eat it plain by the handful. Although I often wince at the cost as I toss it into my grocery basket, and nearly always have multiple knobs of ginger in varying stages of vigor in the crisper that I could be making better use of before they go to waste, it never occurred to me to make candied ginger from scratch.
I think that it’s the word candy that intimidates me. While in real life it means a sweet confection, culinarily for me it conjures up images of messes of scalded sugar and burnt pan bottoms. Hot sugar hurts. I’m instinctively averse to things that require thermometers — illness and candy making included.
I took to the cookbook collection and the Google, and discovered that while many people do use a candy thermometer to make crystallized ginger, it was possible to do without. I gathered up the four most promising recipes. Then just did my own thing anyway.
I peeled about a pound of ginger. With a spoon. That was one of those facts that I’ve always known, but never really put into practice, because I’m never peeling large enough quantities. The best way to peel a knob of ginger with the least amount of wastage is by simply scraping it with a spoon. It allows you to take off JUST the skin, and you can also get into all the weird nooks and crannies with it. Once the ginger was peeled, I thinly sliced it and put it into a heavy bottomed saucepan, covered it with water, brought to a boil and then left it to simmer for about 20 minutes, until the tough roots were slightly tender and a little translucent.
Into the saucepan went 4 cups of water, 4 cups of sugar, and a hefty pinch of sea salt. I gave it a good stir and brought to a boil, then brought it back down to a simmer and left it over super low heat for 45 minutes. Then I removed from the heat and let stand for 2 hours. At this stage the syrup was spicy and sweet, and fairly deliriously delicious. We kept finding reasons to go into the kitchen so we could steal spoonfuls. My original plan had been to drain and sugar all of the pieces, but the syrup was so addictive that I decided to split the batch. Half got drained and tossed in regular sugar, them left to dry for a few hours before being stored in a jar. The other half was poured directly into jars still in the syrup. The syrup-soaked ginger was great drizzled over yogurt or skyr in the morning, mixed into cocktails or poured over ice cream in the evenings.
