How ginger transforms dishes, from China to Chicago
As a child, second-generation Chinese-American food writer Kevin Pang did not like mistakenly biting into slices of ginger in the food his mother prepared.
'It is thick and meaty. It's these coins that you find in braised dishes, and when you bite into it, there's nothing pleasant about it. It burns, it's woody, it's fibrous, you can't chew through it. And that was sort of my introduction to ginger,' he says in a video call from Chicago.
'As a kid, with a very undeveloped palate, and when everything is a lot more sensitive, a food as strong as ginger is not something that I necessarily thought, 'Oh, great – thanks Mum for including ginger in this recipe,'' he recalls.
But as Pang, now the co-author of A Very Chinese Cookbook , got older, he began to appreciate how this spice added another flavour dimension to dishes. Jeffrey Pang, co-author with Kevin Pang of A Very Chinese Cookbook, with a dish of lobster with ginger and scallions
'It might be one of those things where you appreciate it more as you age, as you develop a palate, as you realise that, no, you're not really eating ginger whole, you're not biting into it, but it has numerous applications,' he says.
Pang calls ginger and garlic 'besties' when stir-frying vegetables like bok choy and gai lan, and ginger is essential in beef dishes – from marinating ground beef with ginger juice, to adding large slices or coins of ginger when braising chunks of meat, which Pang says adds dimensions of spiciness and herbaceousness to the dish.
When impressing his non-Chinese friends, he likes to make ginger scallion sauce by chopping scallions, grating ginger and then pouring hot oil on them, which creates a compelling sizzle and a strongly fragrant scent. Crystallised ginger.
'I like the aroma that it kicks up from the scallion and the ginger, and the fact that it bubbles and boils. It's alchemy – this very magical moment where [the oil] wakes up the aroma. And my friends always say, 'That smells incredible.'
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