Home-made candied ginger

In my childhood recollections, candied ginger is a Proustian madeleine. [If you don't know what I mean, look up the last pair of words in Google.] This delicious foodstuff is associated, in my memories, with Xmas celebrations in the house of my paternal grandparents in Oliver Street, Grafton.

Anne, Don and me at our grandparents' home in Oliver Street

Often, when I drop in at an organic-foods store in St-Marcellin, I buy a bag of candied ginger... and I generally end up eating it all before I get home. You see, I really seem to be addicted to candied ginger. Recently, my Choranche neighbor Tineke gave me a jar of fine candied ginger in syrup from the Netherlands. Recipes on the Internet suggest that it's quite easy to prepare. So, I gave it a try. First, you peel the ginger roots and chop them into pieces.

From that point on, it's basically just a matter of boiling the pieces, three or four times, in a sugar syrup. Here's the end result:

My home-made candied ginger is delicious... but there won't be much of it left by the time this blog post is published. The chunks are soft and tasty, but they're slightly stringy, which simply indicates that the raw ginger rhizomes (roots) that I purchased in a local fruit and vegetables store were not quite as fresh as I would have hoped. If the rhizomes had been younger (as seems to be the case for the abopve-mentioned Dutch product), there would have been no stringiness whatsoever, and the boiling operations would have rendered the chunks quite transparent.

Incidentally, when I drained the ginger chunks, I set aside the precious syrup in which they had been cooked. I then used this syrup to flavor chilled Perrier, obtaining a liquid madeleine from my childhood in South Grafton: ginger ale.

Maybe the ideal way of obtaining fresh ginger rhizomes would be to actually grow the plant here in my vegetable garden at Gamone. For me, though, there's a problem. Experts state that the ideal constant temperature for ginger plants is around 25 degrees Centigrade. That more-or-less rules out Gamone... unless, of course, I were to install a small greenhouse. And, to heat it in winter, I could use a solar panel. Now, that sounds like a pretty complex project aimed at resurrecting my madeleine. Maybe I should choose the relatively simple strategy adopted by Marcel Proust, and write a book on the subject.