Save Yourself The Trouble And Don't Grate Fresh Ginger With A Fork

Ginger is a miracle food, imparting flavorful and medicinal powers to food and drink for over 4000 years. It's spicy, sweet, fragrant, and a veritable cure-all for a long list of emotional and physical maladies. The only downside to ginger is its pesky preparation; its knobby, bulbous shape, papery skin, and hard, stringy interior are difficult and tedious to prime for cooking.

You must rid ginger of its inedible skin before you grate it or otherwise break it down into small pieces to render it ready for use in recipes. If you don't have a grater, you might be tempted to grate ginger with a fork. Unfortunately, this technique will create much more effort and trouble than it's worth. If you're using a fork to scrape ginger to shreds, you're applying three small prongs to an uneven, hard surface, which will result in a painstakingly slow and tiring process.

Furthermore, grating ginger with a fork won't result in the texture you get from using a grater. Instead, you'll get stringy, awkward chunks that won't disperse flavor evenly when cooking with ginger, nor will they blend smoothly into the texture of sauces or sautees. No one likes to bite into a chunk of ginger or get a string of it stuck in their teeth.

Instead of spending 10 minutes and countless hand cramps to shred a tablespoon of ginger with a fork, you're better off mincing ginger with a knife. You may not have a grater in your kitchen, but you probably have a knife. Mincing ginger is an effective and efficient way to break ginger down, and you have more control and precision on how small you want the dice.

However, a grater is one of the most basic and fundamental tools for a kitchen. You'll use it nearly as much as you'll use a knife. You can use a grater in many unique ways to streamline countless recipes, prepping a wide variety of ingredients, from vegetables and citrus zest to cheese and aromatics. Grated ginger assumes an almost pulpy texture that's optimal for infusion into the vast majority of dishes, from stir fries and sauces to marinades and rubs. So, if you plan on cooking with ginger, you should invest in a grater.

They come in many forms, from box graters to microplane styles. Most are very affordable; a box grater will cost you less than five dollars, for example. You can find graters at any home appliance store, grocery superstore, or online vendor.