Christmas Gift for Neighbors and Friends: Homemade Candied Ginger

As I continue rediscovering things that I enjoy doing, I find that youtube takes me down many rabbit trails.  They know me all too well by now, which feels creepy.  But they do make good suggestions as far as the next video they know I'll love.

That's how I came across this fabulous lady at prepsteaders  I've watched several of her videos now and each one has inspired me to do a new project at home.

First, Krista inspired us to make candied ginger.  I've never liked candied fruits to be honest.  They taste old, fake, dry, way to sweet and nothing like fruit at all.  But Krista is so convincing in her videos! I decided to give it a try.

Our project turned out so well that we decided to make LOTS of this stuff and give it out as our neighbor gifts for Christmas this year.





That bag has about 50 grams of product in it.  I had used one large root with lots of branches (from Walmart) for our first test batch.  It made enough to nearly fill this jar below.  But my family ate most of it before I could put it in gift bags!  This is all that was left before I could make one little gift bag out of it.

 

I suspect that it would have been enough to fill 4-5 bags had it been left alone.  oh well.

So then I went to a different, fancier grocery store and bought pretty much all of their ginger.  It was a lot!  Not sure exactly how much.  Surprisingly, I found this second bunch of ginger to be of lower quality. It was not as big and round, it was stringer, and the color was more grey instead of bright white.  Anyway, I think it turned out fine but peeling it took a lot longer.

I got another 12 bags of candied ginger from this second batch.  UG. I'm going to have to make probably 3-4 more batches to get as many as I need.  Which is fine. It's not hard.  It just takes time. And ginger isn't that expensive. It's pretty affordable.  It does take quite a bit of sugar.  But lucky for me I got a big 50 lb bag of organic sugar not long ago from the bulk buy that I participate in and so i feel ok about using it up for this project. I also find that I can reuse some of the sugar that gets crusty and sticks to the pan. I just scrap it into a jar, break it up a bit and reuse it. Same for the syrup. I kept the syrup from the first batch and reused it in the second batch so that it took a lot less sugar to get a nice syrup going.

So here's the video I watched with my girls.




TIP: I found that some of our ginger was still a big moist the next morning.  So I turned on my oven and let it warm up to the lowest setting. Then I turned OFF the oven and stuck the tray of ginger inside for 20-30 mins. They came out much drier!  So if your ginger isn't totally dry in the morning you can try drying them out in a warm oven.  It does also help to have very thin slices as suggested in the video.

Also, I tried adding some candied ginger to my herbal tea as suggested in the video, and found that while it DID sweeten my tea nicely, I couldn't really taste the ginger much. However, eating one of these is for sure a real treat. They are delicious and have just the right amount of kick.

Now, what to do with all the ginger water I've got???  I've got 3 quarts saved so far and some I just threw out because it's getting overwhelming.  It's SUPER potent stuff.

UPDATE:  Kay, so our first two batches went really well, but I still needed more bags to hand out as gifts.  So I went to the store for the mother load. I brought home four pounds of ginger root!  Yikes.  The cashier was looking at me funny.  So my girls and I spent a good long while preparing the ginger and boiling it the three different times. I put it in for a final boil and left it at a low simmer with my husband to watch over it. My older girls and I had been invited to a cookie exchange and off we went.  When I came back the house had a charred smell and our ginger was a total loss :(  This is now the status of our last ginger candy batch:

Sorry neighbors.  Maybe next year.