Ginger Sugar Powder

Indonesia is famous for its spice-laden food. We use many kinds of spices, including hot peppers and those of ginger family. The Chinese also like to use ginger to add flavor to some of its cuisine, such as steamed fish, steamed/stirfried/Braised chicken, rice congee, and many more. It is also used to eliminate fishy smell of seafood especially in soups.

The Javanese also like to mix ginger and other spices into herb potion called "jamu". Beside its warming property, it is also believed to improve health if consumed on regular basis. 

I myself, love to use ginger when cooking Chinese and Indonesian food, such as : steamed fish, rice vermicelli soup, and rendang (spiced chicken/beef). 

I love ginger drink too. At rainy season like this, a glass of hot ginger drink will be superb! It's been my favorite drink during cool rainy season.

When I was still working at a community development foundation, I once visited a training center for agricultural and liverstock farming. There, I had an opportunity to see them training the women how to make Sugar Ginger powder for home industry. About several years ago I tried to practice it at home, but because I used too much liquid (water) it was failed and turned into ginger caramelized candy instead! 

Not giving up, this time I give it a try again and here is the result! Check it out! 

1). First of all, there are two types of ginger root. The red and white ginger. The red one is more spicy, while the white ginger is mild.Thus, if you can't tolerate too spicy then the white ginger is perfect for you. So first, have them washed and brushed before being processed.

2. Skinned and washed once more. The ratio is 1:2 (if you are using 1 kg of ginger then you must use 2 kgs of sugar (either white or brown) but if you like it more spicy, than you can use 1:1 ratio.

3. Grate all the ginger (this will take time and also excruciating burning sensation on your hands if you don't protect them with gloves. Halfway I gave up and decided to use the blender, but my blender needs some water in order to process the ginger and I ended up using more than 2 cups of water as you could see in this picture. My suggestion is best to hand grate so we could control the amount of water (± 1 cup) or you could use the food processor. I was quite nervous  that the juice turned this much, I was afraid it would turn into caramelized candy again... So, my suggestion is: Watch the amount of water. 

4. The next step :  Run it through a sieve and pour all the ginger juice into the skillet. You may use a non-stick skillet.

5. Add 2 kgs of granulated sugar. Turn on the gas stove and start to stir. Remember that we must continue to stir until it's done. Don't leave it unattended as it can brim over and spill when it is boiled, and if you don't keep stirring it, it may singed at the bottom.

6) Starting to boil. Keep stirring. 

7) The Sugar starts to change form into a thicker caramelized sugar. From this point on, turn the stove to low heat and simmer. Keep stirring.

8) After around 1 hour, the caramelized sugar turns thicker like this. You can see that it's starting to change form into sandy caramelized. Increase the speed of stirring.

9). The caramelized sugar turn into this in around 75 minutes of cooking and stirring.

10) Finally, it's getting dried up and become sandy powder like this. Make sure that you reduce the heat more into a very low one. Keep stirring vigorously and try to break as many sugar lumps as you can into sugar powder using the wooden spoon. Make sure that the sugar powder gets dried.

11) Now it's done! The next step is to cool it down. If you want a finer powder, you could use the food processor to mill it into fine powder after it's cooled. 

12) Then, you can store it in jars or you can packed it in plastic bags and seal it. This sugar ginger powder can be stored in jars at room temperature for more than a year. If you store in the fridge it can be stored for more than 2 years.

Now, you can always have a cup of hot ginger drink anytime you want! Just mix a couple spoonful of sugar ginger powder with a glass of hot water and here you go! If you try this at home, do let me know how's your result turn out.