Recipes with ginger

Ginger is a rhizome rather than a root, and you can feel it under the knife: the flesh runs fibrous along its length, and those fibres decide how you cut it. Its heat is not chilli heat — it does not burn the tongue so much as warm the back of the throat — and it fades with cooking, so the same piece gives a biting dish or a gentle one depending on when it goes in.

Two treatments stand clearly apart. Grated or pounded to a paste at the start, it dissolves into the dish and disappears: Ethiopian kik alicha and gomen send it through the fat alongside garlic and turmeric, and Réunionnais rougail tomate crushes it with chilli. Cut into fine matchsticks and added late, it stays sharp and obvious: Chinese vegetable congee scatters it over the bowl as it is served, and Ghanaian kelewele coats plantain in it before frying.

Two practical markers. A young rhizome with thin, taut skin is better scraped with a teaspoon than peeled; an old wrinkled one is more fibrous and is better grated than chopped. And it keeps for weeks whole in the fridge, or months in the freezer, where it grates straight from frozen — handy for pumpkin soup, hausa koko and ginataang kalabasa.