How to: Peel ginger efficiently

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Ginger is one of my all-time favorite ingredients, its spicy flavor adding a nice zing to much of the food at chez Celia. I use it for everything from stir-fries to sushi, from marmalades to flavoring kombucha. In the winter I steep slices in simmering water with lemon and honey to ward off the ever-present chill.

And yet, for all the ginger love it is one pain in the rear to peel. It always seems that you have two choices: You can either hack away at the ginger with a paring knife, getting rid of the peel but sacrificing a good chunk of the good stuff... or you can take a vegetable peeler to the root and miss large bits of peel in those tiny crevices and end up having to hack those bits off anyway. It's really a problem. I lose sleep over it. (Okay, not really. But it really irks me to have to choose between wasting perfectly good ginger or doing a terrible job of peeling it.)

This past week I came into possession of two pounds of very fresh ginger root at the bargain price of $0.99 while shopping the discount produce bin at our local international grocery. How could I resist a huge bag of ginger for less than a dollar?  (Looking back on it, I really should have gotten the other two bags and found something to do with it.) So I came home with this gigantic bag of ginger and a couple of large bottles of rice vinegar, thinking that maybe I could find a recipe in one of my preserving books for sushi ginger. A girl can't have enough pickled ginger lying around, after all. Lo and behold, I found a recipe in Canning for a New Generation that looked perfect.

And I have to tell you, I learned a lot more from that recipe than just how much vinegar to use and how long to process the jars. That's right, I learned how to peel ginger efficiently.  And it's so quick and easy I really must share with you.  Are you ready? Okay.

Use a spoon.


I know this sounds like an odd technique, but I'm completely astonished that I didn't think of this sooner. (This, of course, is why Lianna Krissoff is a published cookbook author and I am not.) The curve of the spoon and the edge make for the absolute perfect tool for peeling ginger. You can scrape off the peel faster than saying "vegetable peeler"--and you can get in between those little knobs of root. Genius.