How to Make Pickled Ginger - Gari

Welcome back to another cooking video. Today I'm going to show you how to make pickled ginger. Now I meant to do this a long time ago but because I wasn't able to get the fresh young ginger roots which you need, they look like this, then I wasn't able to make it properly so I didn't want to do it. But I haven't been able to find them so I'm just going to do it with the old ginger roots. Now if you use the fresh ginger roots they're a much more delicate flavor and much more tender and also you don't have to add a food coloring like red seashore leaves I used because they have these pink shoots which they release the natural pink color. So if you can get the fresh young ginger that's best, if not then just do what I did with the old ginger. Okay, let's get straight into it, let's go. Okay to start you're going to need 300-grams of ginger root and you're going to peel it using a spoon. Now a spoon is the most effective and easiest way to peel your ginger. It produces the least amount of waste and it just gets into all the crevices and corners where a knife usually would use or waste a lot more ginger. So this is the actual speed at which I'm scraping the ginger skin off. In the past a lot of people commented on my videos saying that I'm speeding it up or something that's not true, this is the actual speed. Just try it yourself, I'm just going very, very quickly with the spoon over the surface and scraping a tiny little sliver of the skin off the ginger as I do it. Okay, so once you've peeled all the ginger you're going to need to cut it into ultra-thin slices of ginger so you can make beautiful pickled ginger. For this I'm using mandolin, now this mandolin I just bought here locally, I can't seem to find the same one online but it just produces the most thin consistent slices of ginger that I can find. They're ultra-thin and you can nearly see through them. If you can't do that with your mandolin you can do it by hand like this, it will just take a little bit more effort and time to do but it is completely possible to cut your own ginger by hand, it's just going to take quite a while to do all the slices. Now once you've sliced it super-thin like this you're going to want to salt it. So for this just place it in some Tupperware and you're going to add about two to three teaspoons of salt and then you just want to mash it in with your hands just to get it covered all over. Now you're going to need this to rest for ten minutes and in the meantime you're going to put a pot of boiling water, two liters of water and 200-grams of rice vinegar and then just add your ginger in there. Now what the rice vinegar does is it makes sure the ginger doesn't turn a dark yellow so it keeps it a nice pale color. Here I'm just going to add a little bit more for good measure and you're going to want to cook your ginger for three minutes and once it's cooked for three minutes then you're going to want to whisk it out. Now just whisk it out and straight into a sieve because you need it to start draining, it needs to be dry before you put it into a jar, so just give it a good time to drain out. Now in a different pot you're going to add 300-grams of rice vinegar, 200-grams of sugar and 8-grams of salt and then you're going to bring this to the boil and as soon as it starts to boil you're going to turn off the heat and then you're just going to watch the pan and mix it around a little bit to make sure the sugar is dissolved. Once the sugar is dissolved take it off and let it start to cool down, you don't want to overcook this mixture. Now place the dried ginger into a jar, make sure to not touch it with your hands because you don't want to add any bacteria to this dried ginger, and fill up the jar nice and full up to the top. Once you've done that you're going to need two shisho leaves, red shisho that is, this is to color the ginger. I like to use two because it gives a nice pale color to it, but you can use up to three to four if you want a more intense color, but I think nice pale colors are a way better way to go. Place them on top and then you're going to want to fill it with the rice vinegar mixture we just made in the pot before. Fill that to the top and now just press it in a little bit and close it. You're going to want to keep this in the fridge and every day you want to shake it up. The reason for this is because otherwise as you can see here it concentrates the colors around the red shisho leaves, so mixing it up a little bit like this and then putting it back in the fridge will help distribute the color evenly. This is it after five days, you can see it's a bit more colored, shake it up and then place it back in. This here is after seven days, it's become a nice even pink color everywhere, you can see, and this is how it started out, you can see the big difference. Now it's ready to be consumed after seven days in the fridge and mixing it up and you can see it's a beautiful pale pink color. Look at that ginger, it's sweet, sour, spicy, salty, it's everything you want. Now you can keep this in the fridge for two to three months and just enjoy your pickled ginger. There we go, now you know how to make delicious homemade pickled ginger. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you give this a try and use it on some of these sushi recipes. Thank you for watching, see you in the next video – goodbye! END