Fresh local ginger offers alternative taste to grocery store variety

My vote for the least recognizable edible currently at Oxford’s Farmers Market is a 2-inch yellow chunk of a root topped with a 2-foot tall leafy stalk at Jennifer Bayne’s 7 Wonders Farm. Every week, I overhear someone asking Jennifer to identify it.

The mysterious object is fresh young ginger. It looks less familiar than the ginger sold in supermarkets, and it tastes different.

Unlike many cultivated plants, ginger does not exist in a wild state. It was domesticated several thousand years ago by Austronesian people in Southeast Asia. Austronesians migrated beginning around 5,000 years ago across a vast expanse of the Indian and Pacific oceans, westward as far Madagascar and eastward as far as Hawaii and Easter Island. How they accomplished this remarkable migration in tiny canoes is a mystery.

As they migrated, the Austronesian people took their languages with them. Because of this remarkable ancient migration pattern, 5% of the world’s people currently speak an Austronesian language such as Javanese.

The ancient Austronesians apparently took ginger with them. The domestication of ginger spread westward through China and India, and it reached Europe during the ancient Roman times, probably brought by Arab traders. U.S. ginger is grown primarily in Hawaii, perhaps also a legacy of the ancient Austronesian migration. The word “ginger” reached Western European languages like English via India’s ancient Sanskrit word “srngaveram” and the Greek word “zingiberis.”

Today, India grows 43% of the world’s ginger, and China ranks third at 14% of world production. Surprisingly, second place in world production is Nigeria, at 17%, even though ginger production didn’t reach Nigeria until 1927. I haven’t discovered much about this, except that ginger is grown mainly by subsistence farmers rather than by commercial farmers and in some Nigerian languages “to ginger” means to “to trigger someone to take action,” for some reason.

The ginger knob most familiar in American supermarkets is mature and imported from Asia, with a thick tough skin that must be cut away to get to a fibrous flesh. In contrast, the fresh young ginger locally available this time of year from 7 Wonders Farm has a thin skin that can be washed but doesn’t need to be peeled.

Mature, thick-skinned supermarket ginger needs to be grated or chopped to break down the fibrous flesh. Compared with mature ginger, the flesh of young ginger is milder and much more tender. The best way to take advantage of our local young ginger is to thinly slice or julienne it and to sprinkle it over almost anything. Young ginger spreads a warm mellow flavor, much less sharp and harsh than the mature variety.

As a bonus, the stems and long narrow leaves of 7 Wonders Farm’s fresh young ginger can also be eaten. Finely chop the stems and shred the leaves and – as with the root – sprinkle them over almost anything.

The most important piece of advice regarding our fresh local ginger is to use it quickly. The soft root that doesn’t need peeling when brought home from the Farmers Market on Saturday will start to turn darker and require peeling by midweek. The 2-foot-high stems will also start to bend over, and the leaves will start to wilt. 

The 7 Wonder Farm fresh young ginger crop won’t survive a hard freeze, so get it now if it is still at this week’s farmers market. Otherwise, watch for it next autumn.

James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.