How to grow and make your own gari (pickled ginger for sushi)

To make gari, the lovely pink pickled ginger for sushi, you need to have very fresh ginger roots, which are not to easy to find. So I grew my own! Bough ginger roots sometimes have a little green bud, or develop one if you leave them outside the fridge, and in this case you can just break a piece off (the one with the bud, of course) and plant it! I did just this, not knowing what to expect, and I was rewarded with a big leafy ginger plant! When I 'harvested' the roots they were fresh and fragrant, perfect for making gari.

For the recipe I looked up one of my favourite books, The Book of Sushi, published by Kodansha International. Sadly Kodansha doesn't publish anymore in English, which is a real pity as they made some outstanding books on Japanese culture, including several cooking books, so this book may not be easy to find now.

I washed my ginger roots (I could not break much of it, as I made the mistake of planting it in a pot with a lemon tree and the root was too deep down to remove completely), but I had enough.

The skin is easy to remove with a spoon or finger nails. Remove the buds, you just need the root, hopefully with a hint of pink in it. Then slice the root as finely as you can manage.

Then I added a few generous pinches of salt (I used some unrefined salt, but the book is not specific on which salt - or how much, to use) and left it stand for one day. I put a weight on top too, to make sure that the ginger got well pickled by the salt, but this was not requested by the original recipe.

The day after I rinsed the ginger under fresh water.

Then the book says: ....place in a marinade made of 1 cup of rice vinegar, 7 tablespoons water and 2½ taspoons sugar. Allow the ginger to marinate one week.

Well, first of all I noticed that I run out of rice vinegar, but I had some sushi vinegar, which already contains sugar and salt. Secondly, and this is my personal taste, I rather use less sugar (and salt) so I did a mixture of half sushi vinegar and half water. Thirdly, I brought the mixture to the boil, threw the ginger slices in, boiled them from a few seconds and turned the element off. I did this simply because I felt safer pickling it this way, and the result was great! I stored the gari in a glass jar in the fridge for one week before using it, now it is about two months old, almost finished, but still very good.

The original colour is a very light pink, which I like very much as it feels natural to me. The second pink, very vibrant, I made by soaking my own made gari for just a few minutes in the brine of shibazuke, which is a Japanese pickled mix of cucumber and eggplant and red shiso. It is the red shiso that gives out the pink/magenta colour, so anything picked with this leaf will work (and pickles also have plenty of brine left over, which I never throw away but use to colour rice.

Waste not waste not, this is my motto!

Natural gari (top) and gari coloured with red shiso (bottom)

I have to say that I was very happy with the results for taste, texture and ... colours!

How to make Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum), and Sweet New Zealand

Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum) Before I start I would like to say that I don't have a sugar thermometer, essential if you are really into confectionery, and that I didn't use much sugar for these Turkish delights. Many recipes use much more sugar, and it is not that I wanted to make a low sugar treat here (it is still pretty sweet), it is just that making it at home really makes me realize how much sugar there is already in my diet, and if I can have something with a little less... well, why not! This method is 'home friendly' i.e. these can be made at home with very little effort and equipment, and the recipe comes from my book Sweet As... where I also have the recipe for lavender and orange blossom Turkish Delights. Ingredients 1 l water 300 g sugar 2 tbsp lemon juice 100 g cornflour 1 tbsp frozen raspberries 1 tbsp rose water icing sugar (very little) and cornflour (lots) to dust. In a pot put hal...

Silver beet Paneer, a variation of Palak Paneer

The other day I showed you my curry made with borage , ‘invented’ because I have tons of it in the garden! The other green-leaf crop that does well in Auckland is silver beet. My old plants (from last year!) got so tall that I started collecting only the little leaves from the stalks, and they look like spinach. One of my favourite Indian dishes is Palak Paneer (or Panir), spinach with panir cottage cheese, and this variation is made using my silver beet. I washed (many times!) the small silver beet leaves, and then I steamed them and drain them. In a heavy pot I heated 2 tbsp of vegetable oil (I used rice bran oil) and sautéed for 30 seconds: 1/2 tsp ground cumin 1/2 tsp ground coriander 1 tsp turmeric 1/3 tsp ground chili then I added 2 roughly chopped shallots and, after 3 minutes, a good pinch of salt and the cooked silver beet. I cooked everything on low for about 20 minutes (you may need to add just a little water if the silver beet is too dry) and then finely pureed the content ...

Home Made Marzipan Sweets

This is another recipe from my book Sweet As , and something that I love to make for Xmas. I would like to say that for marzipan you should get the best almonds around, natural, but here in New Zealand the almonds taste different from the ones in Italy. They are imported, not sure where from most of the time, but they are not top grade almonds. Still, with a few tips, you can make your marzipan taste great even with 'regular' almonds! Buy them natural, not blanched, you need to blanche then yourself or the result will be too dry. To blanch them you need to put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, and then add cold water and take the skin off, one by one. For this recipe you will need: 200 g almonds 100 g icing sugar 5 apricot kernels. As I was saying before, the almond here have little taste, so I like to collect the stones from apricot and get the almonds out. They are a real pain to crack! In the photo above you can see apricot stones and kernels. The apricot kernel...

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