Chef Shows Off How To Make Grating Ginger So Much Easier With One Simple Trick
Fresh ginger adds a warm, spicy kick to every dish it becomes a part of, from stir-fries and soups to dressings and marinades — it's one of the ingredients for making a scrumptious steak marinade. But while the herbaceous root is easy to come by and use, grating it can be a very demanding task. Not to mention how frustrating it gets when its fibers clog the microplane; we know how hard it is to scrape off every pulpy bit trapped in the grater's teeth. Even professional cooks know this struggle, so it doesn't come as a surprise that a chef is shedding light on a simple technique that addresses the issue.
@fallowchefs This hack will transform how you cook with ginger 🫚
In a TikTok video posted on @fallowchefs' account, a chef explained her trick to make grating ginger effortlessly simple. "What you can do is just pop your ginger in the freezer ... When you freeze it, all of that water [content] is turning into ice particles, which are swelling and weakening all of that fiber, and it basically just snaps off when you're grating it," she said while grating a piece of ginger that's been frozen for six hours in the TikTok clip.
Why this freezing hack works
The science behind why this hack works comes down to basic physics. Ginger is approximately 79% water by weight. Freezing the root turns all that moisture into ice crystals that expand, which then alters the overall texture of the ginger. As explained by the chef in the TikTok video, the process weakens ginger's fibrous structure, causing the strands to become brittle and break apart more easily and cleanly when the root is sliced through a grater or other tools, such as a fork.
Fresh ginger tends to have stringy fibers that can easily become tangled around the grater's teeth. Beyond eliminating stringy messes, frozen ginger's colder, harder texture allows for smooth grating, making it harder to accidentally scrape your knuckles or fingers as you run the root back and forth across the grater's teeth.
Before popping your ginger into the freezer, remove its skin first. Peel the skin off by scraping it away with the edge of a metal spoon. This is one of the handy kitchen hacks to save you time during meal preparation. Once it's peeled and frozen solid, you can just grab a root and grate it directly into the dish whenever you need it.