RECIPE: How to Make Sushi Ginger – Gari

Sushi ginger, also known as gari, is one of the essential accompaniments to sushi and sashimi. When eating sushi you expect to find wasabi and soy sauce, which you mix together to dip your fish into. Ginger is eaten separately, between the pieces of sushi or sashimi, and its purpose is to cleanse the palette between delicious bites.

The ginger is pickled by marinating in a sweetened vinegar and therefore it has sweet and sour flavours, with a warming kick from the ginger itself.

Ginger is naturally a creamy-beige colour but you will often see sushi ginger that is a delicate pink. This is usually due to it being pickled with red shiso, a herb that is very popular in Japan. It’s also known as perilla.

Gari is very easy to make and we promise you that this recipe beats any shop bought sushi ginger hands down.

How to Make Sushi Ginger

(Makes a 500ml jar)

Ingredients

A big piece of ginger – we used about 4 pieces of this beauty. That works out at about 500g but you’ll be able to judge depending on how thinly you slice it and how much you want to squish into the jar.

1.5 cups of rice vinegar (~350ml). We recommend rice vinegar because it has a lovely flavour, but you could use white wine vinegar or white vinegar if you can’t easily find rice vinegar.

1 cup of sugar (~250 ml)

1 tbs salt

Optional red shiso or red perilla leaves (for colour)

Method

Scrape the skin off the ginger. You could use a vegetable peeler, but some people use a teaspoon just to get the finest layer of skin off. Ginger skin is edible but, because you want this to look pretty, it’s worth getting all the skin off.

Finely slice the ginger as thin as possible, ideally using a mandoline. You need the ginger to be as thin as possible so it’s worth looking into a mandoline that can slice extremely fine. You’re aiming for less than 1mm if possible.

Also, while they are great kitchen tools, a mandoline is basically a razor blade on a board and can be dangerous to clumsy cooks such as us. So do use the safeguard that is usually provided with the gadget, or wear special gloves.

how to make sushi ginger - slicing the ginger

If you don’t have a mandoline, a handheld vegetable peeler gets reasonable results.

Try to get a variety of shapes and sizes. Ginger has a grain so it may do this for you naturally as you slice.

Place the ginger slices in a bowl, sprinkle over the salt and mix. Leave for 20-30 minutes.

In the meantime, wash your jar with soapy water and then sterilise it by pouring boiling water in. Let it stand for a few minutes. You could also empty the water and let it dry in a barely warm oven for 10 minutes or so, but we don’t bother. Vinegar is acidic so the jar just needs to be very clean.

Squeeze the ginger to release the salty water. Do this gently so you don’t crush all the pieces together. Then pat with kitchen paper to draw out more salt water.

Place the ginger slices in the jar. Take some time to unwrap any squeezed pieces that have squished together, so that they go in as individual slices.

Put the vinegar and sugar into a saucepan and heat slowly. Wait until the sugar has completely dissolved and the mixture is about to boil.

Then pour the sugary-vinegar over the ginger in the jar.

If you have shiso leaves, this is the time to put these in the jar.

Put the lid on and let the pickle cool naturally.

Even though you’ll want to eat this immediately, you need to wait for at least a week for the pickling flavours to develop.

This will keep in the fridge for many months. Honestly, it is so good that you’ll want to get another batch pickling straight away because you will be eating this endlessly…