Patience and Ginger Confit, Part 4

Finally, after 5 days the ginger is ready to be canned. Sterilize the jars, keep them pristine -- no fingers since you are a mold that will contaminate them -- and fill them with the ginger in its syrup which has been drained and brought to a boil one last time. No cold liquid into hot canning jars.

If you do all of these steps properly -- the chopping, soaking, boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, soaking, boiling, soaking, boiling, canning -- the ginger will keep for years. Love springs eternal. But once open, once disturbed, once you start to enjoy a jar, it lasts no more than a few months. Your contagion and air itself get inside and break down everything you worked so hard, and waited so patiently, to preserve.

But after five days I think it's always worth it, the effort. If it's this good, it's always worth it. Whether it last a week, a month, or a year, I have ginger confit.

Patience and Ginger Confit, Part 3

It's two days later and now I drain the syrup again into a saucepan. I bring it to a boil, reduce the heat to medium for 8 minutes, then pour it back over the half-confit-ed ginger in the bowl. Cover it. Wait 2 more days. More sleeping. More praying my kitchen isn't too cold and 5 days of my life and hours of my peeling and chopping efforts have not been for naught.

This is the test. I somehow managed to get through the past 2 days, but can I do it again? Can you learn patience? Does having done it once make it easier?

Maybe it's like getting your heart broken -- it still hurts every time, but maybe the hurt is mellower.

Maybe it's like the ginger after each boiling in Part 1 -- you want the piquancy because it reminds you that you're alive, that you feel something. So two more days of patience and masochism.

Or maybe it's like fear -- you can learn not to think about it. It's rare you actually stop being afraid. Fear is rational. You should be afraid of falling from a height. That's what keeps you from doing stupid things, but you still probably peer over high railings, hike mountains or crags, and seek out the best view. The return might be worth it.

Patience, too, has its returns -- delayed gratification, expectation, anticipation...and in the case of ginger, the practical justification that the finished product will be better than the original. Raw ginger versus confit-ed ginger. There's really no comparison. Even sweetened or candied ginger isn't the same. The confit syrup is like honey instead of sugar granules, with so much more flavour involved. Ginger confit becomes a treat that sneaks slowly into your sinuses, lets you marvel at its beauty, and then on the 10th bite takes control of your whole body, starting in your head and working its way down. It's nothing like an ice cream headache, and nothing like wasabi. You don't want the burn, you want the sweet sharpness that came before in bites 1 through 9, but you've gone past that now. It's the most surprising dessert that pounces unexpectedly. Or maybe a better way to understand it is that it's 9 bites in heaven before the cloud gets pulled out from under you and you fall into something fiery.

So how do you re-ascend?

You wait...

...until your tongue forgets why you burned. Until your mouth forgets why you had to stop chewing. Until you forget how far you fell. Until your heart forgets how it was hurt. 30 minutes? A few hours? A day?

Never forgive the ginger. Forgiveness isn't a natural reaction. Not forgiving is supposed to keep you from getting hurt again. You can, however, forget, which is beyond your control and just as dangerous as stepping out a little too far on that ledge to watch the sunset. Day will turn into night whether you see its last golden rays or not, so maybe you should just stay close to solid ground. But sometimes forgetting is good. It lets you enjoy again the sweetness before the burn. The burn will inevitably come, but you live in blissful ignorance for 9 bites. Just long enough to maybe make it worth it.

Patience and Ginger Confit, Part 2

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of sleep later, I drained the sugar/water from the ginger into a saucepan and brought it to a boil. Reduced the heat to medium to simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. then I poured the syrup (it's almost syrup now) back on top of the ginger in the heat-proof bowl. The plate went back on top, and the bowl is sitting again at room temperature for 2 days. I can't sleep that long.

...but I wait.

Patience and Ginger Confit

Wines can take years to make and mature. Alcohol can take months to infuse. Pickles can take weeks to soften in brine...

...so 5 days for ginger confit should be nothing. It should be like getting to the end of one breath and instead of getting bored and moving on to your next flight of fancy, opening your lungs and inhaling again - it should be natural. And yet, here I am, trying to learn to be patient.

Ingredients
500g fresh ginger (yes, that's half a kilo, which is just over a pound of ginger)
800g sugar (3 cups plus about 3 tbsp)
500mL water (about 2 cups)

There are all sorts of recipes with lime peel and chilies for ginger confit, which sound amazing, but for a first time I looked for a recipe that was basic. I had to actually look in French because candied ginger is not the same as ginger confit, and all my English results for ginger confit were candied ginger. So I looked up gingembre confit and found this.

First the chopping -- a pound of ginger peeled with a spoon is not a task to be embarked upon lightly. Tearing off the gnarled skin from the knuckled fingers, and then chopping the uneven pieces into a mountain of matchsticks takes time. My roommate entered the kitchen at the beginning of the peeling stage and asked what all the garlic was for.

Thank goodness it's not garlic, I thought. It's one thing for my hands to burn (and they did), but it's quite another to smell for two days. I don't want to waft in the metro. An hour later when he came back into the kitchen I was still peeling ginger.

After the matchstick chopping (which goes relatively quickly with a good knife and some leftover ambition) I put the ginger pieces in a bowl of cold water and left them to soak for an hour.

...and for the first time in the ginger process I waited. This is harder than peeling and chopping sometimes. I don't know what was coming out of the ginger, but the water turned immediately cloudy. An hour later when I removed the ginger pieces, there were thick streaks of gelatinous yellow sticking to the bottom of the bowl. I have no idea.

Then the ginger went into a saucepan with enough cold water to cover. I brought the water to a boil. boiled five minutes, and then drained the pan. Refilled the plan with the ginger and fresh cold water, brought to a boil, boiled five more minutes, drained. Repeated two more times. I could have done it four more times but it takes 15-20 minutes per boil session and I'm new at patience. Young, flighty me actually likes the piquancy of the ginger that gets mellowed with further boiling.

While the ginger is boiling for the last time I dissolved the sugar in the water in another saucepan. No need to waste time doing this once the ginger is drained and shivering. I am not a Zen master (yet), after all. After the final boiling and draining, I put the ginger into a clean heat-proof bowl and poured the sugar/water mixture on top. Then I covered the bowl with a plate and let it sit at room temperature for 12 hours.

...and I waited. and I breathed.