Herbal Recipe: How To Make Your Own Gluten Free, Uncooked, Pickled Ginger.
This easy recipe can be used as a condiment and as an herbal remedy.
Making your own pickled ginger is a rewarding exercise. Apart from the creative process of making it, you can also gain satisfaction from the knowledge that your homemade product does not contain any added harmful preservatives which a commercial product might use.
Homemade pickled ginger is useful as an addition to curries, meat, fish or vegetarian dishes, and can also be used as a medicine, taken a teaspoon at a time.
Ginger has been used in traditional Chinese and Indian ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years.
Ginger is an amazing herb: In modern language, it is known as a ‘blood thinner’, as a heart and circulation booster, as a digestive aid, as an antidote to nausea and food-poisoning, for motion sickness, as an antioxidant and detoxifyer of poisons in the liver, and as a catalyst for other herbs and nutrients to be assimilated efficiently. It is a common ingredient of many traditional herbal remedies, because of its ability to increase the effectiveness of herbs and nutrients in foods.
So – here is how to make your gluten-free, homemade pickled ginger.
Take fresh, peeled, ginger roots. Grate up enough to fill two cups.
Pour boiling water over the grated ginger, and leave to soften for one minute.
Strain the ginger and reserve the water for tea,
Into a glass jar which has a good fitting lid, put:
1 cup wine vinegar or cider vinegar
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon sea salt
Stir the sugar and salt into the vinegar.
Now pack your grated and softened ginger into the jar, making sure that the ginger is covered with the vinegar. Top up with a little more vinegar if necessary.
Put on the lid and shake for a minute or so.
Leave the jar on the window-sill for two days, shaking every day.
After two days, put the pickled ginger into the fridge and use as needed.
This is best if it is used within two weeks.
A slice of pickled beetroot added to the jar will give the ginger a pinkish colour. Alternatively, you can buy some shiso leaves from an Asian grocer, and add a little to the pickle mixture. These will give your homemade pickle a pink colour.
As a digestive tonic, take one teaspoonful per day at mealtimes. Note: Do not use ginger in your food, or as a herbal remedy if you are taking a chemical blood thinner such as warfarin. Ginger, like Vitamin C, and Vitamin C rich fruits such as grapefruit, is a natural blood-thinner, so if you take it along with a prescribed medicine such as Warfarin, then you will be doubling up on the blood-thinning effect. Use only one or the other – traditional remedies, or the medication prescribed for you.
Personally, I think it is better to use herbal remedies, and eat the appropriate foods, so that the blood is thinned naturally, rather than take pharmaceutical preparations. Drugs which are commonly prescribed often turn out to have very deleterious effects on the vital organs and nervous system of the body. The side effects of warfarin are not so pleasant, and it can even induce a stroke, the very thing it is meant to prevent. But if you have decided on the standard medical approach for preventing strokes, then do not use ginger as well.
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