I really feel about ginger the way in which different folks really feel about garlic: the right amount so as to add to a recipe is n + 1. If a recipe requires 1 tablespoon contemporary, I get out my microplane and grate no less than 3 times that quantity. I cube crystallized ginger to stir into freezer jams and baked items, even when they don’t name for it, and I’m consistently trying to find ginger teas robust sufficient to put aromatic waste to my sinuses.
I’m advised that my love of ginger is genetic, shared by my maternal grandmother. She was killed in a automotive accident after I was solely three, so there’s part of me that’s on the lookout for her each time I pull a knob of ginger from the freezer. This can be the explanation why I virtually by no means discover ginger merchandise which can be gingery sufficient for me: I’m on the lookout for one thing that can’t be discovered. However Inna’s Tremendous Spicy Ginger Snacks come shut.
Once I lived in San Francisco I knew Inna solely because the Bay Space producer of some excellent jam. It wasn’t till late final yr that I realized they’d branched into ginger, courtesy of a bag of the snacks that my pals Mike and Kristian despatched me for Hanukkah. A candy slap of ginger hit me proper within the nostril after I opened it, and I knew I used to be in for time.
Inna likens its ginger snacks to ginger jerky, and that is a wholly correct comparability: what you get right here is full-on ginger, sliced, dehydrated, and really calmly doctored with sugar and apple cider vinegar. Not like crystallized ginger, which regularly has sufficient sugar to demote the ginger to a competing, if not secondary consideration, Inna’s retains its focus the place it needs to be. That is ginger that travels straight up your nostril with the ruthless accuracy of a heat-seeking missile. It burns all the pieces in its path: your mouth, your throat, your sinuses, your mind. It’s wonderful.
That mentioned, the snacks aren’t all spice — there’s a bit sweetness, too, together with the faint tang of vinegar. Whereas individuals who aren’t ginger followers shall be simply overpowered, these of us who’re will say the steadiness right here is good, no notes. There’s additionally the attraction of the crisp-chewy texture, which each invitations compulsive snacking and fights again simply sufficient to be satisfying. And whereas the snacks are by no means marketed as having any medicinal function, I discover them to be supreme for consuming after an enormous meal or for bringing peace to an irritable abdomen.
What I’m saying right here is that they’re excellent. After I completed the three-ounce bag my pals despatched me, I ordered two 13-ounce luggage. I completed one among them simply earlier than I sat down to put in writing this, spooning the ginger mud from the underside of the bag like a fiend. My grandmother, I’m positive, would approve.