While cooking, one often encounters recipes that require ginger. However, it can be hard to determine how much of the ingredient is needed for a recipe because there are no measurements given in ounces or grams. In order to help make deciding easier when buying groceries and making dishes at home, we conducted an experiment that determined exactly how much ginger you will need.
Fresh ginger should first be peeled with a vegetable peeler. Depending on the desired outcome, it can be diced or grated using either a knife or coarse cheese grater or even sliced thinly using a mandoline for dishes requiring thin slices of fresh ginger root.
In order to find out how much ginger is required for a certain dish, we went to the grocery store. We surveyed their selection of fresh spices and discovered that when you weigh seven different one-inch pieces of ginger, each piece will have varying weights depending on its diameter. At the same time, the difference in flavor for your food would be even more significant. It is usually a lot easier to just shop by weight because you will usually get somewhat the same amount. What we decided to do was to use a 2-ounce piece of ginger for our tests. This translates into about 56.7 grams.
In terms of weight measurements, a one-inch piece of ginger with a 1-inch diameter can yield about 1.1 tablespoons weighing .26 ounces. A slightly bigger 4-inch section will weigh roughly an ounce and measure out to approximately ¼ cup when sliced. In total volume measures, one whole cup of chopped fresh ginger weighs around four ounces, while cooking large quantities requires just over three cups per pound (~4 oz/100 g).
Ginger grows in tropical countries and is known to have white flesh inside light brown skin. It is a knobby fibrous root. You can use it either grated, chopped, sliced, or fresh, but it can also be ground and dried. You can expect both the dried and fresh ginger types to have a hot sweet flavor, but the fresh one should exhibit a light citrus note.
Queen Elizabeth I is credited with the idea of gingerbread man cookies. She had hard ginger cookies decorated with gold leaf and icing to resemble the dignitaries visiting her court, which are now called “gingerbread men.” A whole root of dried or fresh ginger, with several pieces attached together, all part of one main stem/root, is known as a ‘hand.’ The little pieces that make it up are referred to as fingers.
Next time you’re cooking, keep in mind how much ginger to get from the grocery store. You can also take advantage of our custom conversion tool below for any measurements you need. If using a lot of ginger is common practice in your kitchen, consider investing in prepping efficiently with a good vegetable peeler. The one peeler we can tell you with certainty you can rely on is the OXO Good Grips Swivel Peeler that we used quite a lot. You can find it on Amazon. If you are not sure how a peeler works, a mandoline will do just as good of a job but makes the cutting of vegetables a lot easier. We recommend the Mandoline Slicer, which features stainless steel blades. This will guarantee a quick prep time. Both of the tools are really handy and should be part of any decent kitchen. They are also very cheap.
Custom Conversions for Ginger Root
One Ginger Root Equals
- There is 5 Tablespoons (74 mls) of Chopped Ginger in a Ginger Root