Tips - Minced Garlic and Ginger Paste

A good way to further save time & energy when making the restaurant-style curries is to have a pre-prepared minced garlic & ginger paste handy. One common way to do this is to blend together garlic & ginger with a touch of water and salt, but this will rapidly start to discolour & only last 1-2 days kept in the fridge.

A better solution is to freeze the paste instead in ready to use portion sizes. Most of the restaurant styled curry recipes call for 2 cloves garlic & a 1 inch piece of ginger, so our mix will reflect this ratio, and be easy & ready to use as needed.

Minced Garlic and Ginger paste.

Ingredients:

• 2 whole bulbs of garlic, cloves separated & peeled
• 200g ginger, skin removed & rinsed clean
• 1-3 tbsp water as needed to blend.
• 1/2tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Oil 
• 3 ice cube trays

1. Roughly chop Garlic and Ginger into thin pieces to assist processing.
2. Put the chopped garlic and ginger into a food processor or blender.
3. Add 1 tbsp water, and blend until processed into paste, stopping and adding extra tablespoons of water as necessary (a maximum of 3 in total, less is best for final results) to work the mix to process. 
4. When the paste is processing well, stop the blending and add the salt & Oil and process well a further 2 minutes. A tiny dash of turmeric can also be optionally added as well to give a nice colouring touch but is not necessary if freezing and may limit the paste's use with other cuisine cooking.
5. When the paste has finished the 2 minute final process, carefully pour it into ice cube trays, using a spoon to spread around filling the cubes evenly. Put the filled trays into the freezer, and the next day the frozen cubes can be removed into a freezer bag for convenient later usage, at a rate of 1 cube per curry.