Garlic & ginger paste recipe

Having either garlic paste or ginger paste speeds up any recipe that calls for them as ingredients.

Another plus is that (I find) garlic paste especially nature’s over time. Though I wouldn’t recommend keeping it the fridge for more than a week or two, the longer it’s out the stronger it gets.

It’s also great for freezing as you can use it from frozen when cooking as it just thaws in the pot/pan, unless you need to for a marinade or to mix in with something.

Ingredients

• Garlic, or ginger, preferably at least 500g
• Oil, I usually use olive oil.
• Salt

Equipment

• A knife
• Either; a food processor or an immersion blender
• If using an immersion blender, a measuring jug or tall thin container.

Prep (10-20 minutes)

1. Peel the garlic, or, peel the ginger, or both of making a garlic ginger paste.
2. Put into food processor / measuring jug with 1-2 tsp of salt.
3. Blend lightly then scrape down the sides.
4. Add some oil (don’t overdo it) and blend again.
5. Repeat until desired consistency is achieved.
6. Keep in the fridge until it smells/look bad or freeze for up to 3 months.

Save yourself time and some big bucks making your own tasty garlic and ginger paste

It can seem time consuming, standing there peeling half a kilo (or more) of garlic or ginger, but when you get the hang of peeling it’s only really a ten minute job.

Think yourself lucky, I’ve had shifts before literally peeling mountains of garlic all day, that’s 8 hours of my life I’ll never get back 😂 but overall I would say it makes life a lot easier.

Having garlic paste, or ginger paste, to hand when needed is just so much easier than having to break new bulb, pick out 5-6 cloves, peeling and chopping, then deciding you may as well use the whole bloody bulb because there only 2 cloves left.. 😩😩

Also, I know it can be tempting, you’re in the supermarket and you spot tubes of quick and easy garlic (or ginger) above the fresh option, I’ve even done it myself before, and just said fuck it! It’s easier!

But there’s a few reasons I’d choose fresh garlic and ginger over the pre-smooshed alternative;

Cost (money)

The main thing (for me) is the cost, eating well doesn’t need to be expensive!

So let’s have a look, I’m going to use garlic paste for this example but prices with ginger are practically identical. Going by today’s prices (20-02-20) online at tesco.com, the cheapest garlic or ginger paste I can find works out at £0.49p/100g

The most expensive garlic paste I can see however comes in at a massive £0.25/10g! That’s the equivalent of £25/kg

A quick search online tells me that a supermarket garlic cloves weighs on average between 4-7g, so we’ll say 5g and each bulb has about 10-12 cloves, so let’s say 10 cloves of garlic per bulb, making each bulb about 50g.

Now let’s look at the cost of fresh garlic on tesco.com, I can tell you that right now I could buy 1kg of lovely fresh garlic for a whopping £3.20, plus the oil and salt to make the paste that’s about £3.50 plus the electric to blend it say no more than £3.75

Compared to the cheaper pre made option (more on that in a minute) it’s still a saving of £1.15/kg which is pretty good, but compare it to the pricier option and you could be wasting as much as £23.85/kg!

If you’re anything like me and go through a lot of garlic and ginger that builds up to massive amounts of money.

Quality

It goes without saying, but fresh and homemade will beat shop bought every time unless you’ve had something prepared for you, fresh in front of you. (and even then it’s still not as satisfying as doing it yourself)

Making your own garlic or ginger pastes consists of 3 simple ingredients; garlic (or ginger), oil and salt. No more, no less, unless it’s a garlic & ginger paste.

Looking online at the ingredients of pre made garlic and ginger pastes some of them have sugar in (unnecessary), they ALL have some kind of vinegar in and some of them have citric acid it. The most expensive also has potassium sorbate, which I would expect from something that costs more (it’s a completely safe preservative) and it also contains xanthan gum (also completely safe) which I can only assume is to change the texture, which is completely pointless because there’s nothing wrong with the texture to start with.

So these are all food safe ingredients, which is fine, great in fact, and I know that they’re all for preserving qualities (and well done to the people who managed to build a business selling garlic at a ridiculous markup) but it leads onto my next point…

Taste

As I just said all of these pre made pastes contain vinegar, which is good to see a natural preservative, but over time it completely ruins the flavour and all you can taste is sourness!

All the more reason to make it yourself!

Stay tuned for more recipes.