friederike's Reviews
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From Scratch
By Laurence Laurendon, Gilles Laurendon, Catherine Quevremont
Lark Books (NC) - 2014
Candied Ginger : page 226
I absolutely love (chocolate coated) candied ginger, and so does DH, so this was very obviously the first recipe I'd try from this book. The results were very nice, and I'm afraid that only a fraction of the ginger survived the first night! Very, very addictive.
However, while the recipe provided an approximate guidance, there was still quite a bit to find out on my own. For one, the proportions didn't really seem to be right. It was a huge amount of syrup, and when the ginger was cooked and the syrup cooled down, the syrup (considerably more than the one jar described) crystallized and turned into a sweet, crumbly mass of sugar with a faint ginger flavouring - not at all the ginger syrup I thought I could use for cakes and the like! I added more water, and re-used it for another 300g of ginger, and now the syrup looks like what it's supposed to be like.
Another issue I encountered was size and shape. The recipe instructs you to cut the ginger into 2 cm thick slices. First of all, you can hardly call a 2 cm thick pieces of ginger a 'slice' - that would rather be a cube or chunk than a slice. But that made the pieces of ginger so large that even after 1.5 hours I had the idea that they weren't ready yet, so I halved them and cooked them for another hour.
Also, the size of the pieces has considerable influence on their taste. Remember that you are still eating a chunk of ginger! Instead of rolling the ginger in sugar, I coated them in chocolate, to tone down the flavour, and yet even then the halved pieces had a pretty strong, sharp taste of ginger. While I enjoy that, I still thought it was too strong. Also, I realized that the ginger chunks needed to be long as they would otherwise fall through my drying rack (let's not forget the more mundane matters here).
When I prepared the second load of ginger, I cut them into matchsticks; about 0.5 cm (or less) thick and high, and 2-4 cm long. This proved to be pretty fiddly business, as I had to place all of them one by one on the drying rack, and then dip them one by one in the chocolate. No way I'll do that again! Next time I'll probably cut them into chunks of approximately 0.5 cm x 1 cm x 2-4 cm, and then see how that goes.
Edited 13 February 2014:
I left a few pieces to dry just like that, without coating them with chocolate or sugar - not a good idea, their texture will get dry and strange. Chocolate still is the best option, in my opinion. Alternatively, turn them in sugar or keep them in the syrup.
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