Pickled Ginger

Pickled Ginger

　　Yongxin pickled ginger, orange peel, and honey eggplant are a group of unique-flavored, health-enhancing, and suitable-for-all-ages precious traditional specialties. With a long history of production, they are made from carefully selected ingredients using exquisite craftsmanship. Legend has it that during the Kaiyuan era of the Tang Dynasty, when the female singer Xu Hezi was selected to enter the palace, her clear and outstanding singing voice, maintained by regularly eating orange peel and honey eggplant, surpassed all others. The Empress also often used pickled ginger to treat dizziness and headaches, which delighted the Emperor so much that he listed it as a tribute.

　　Pickled Ginger: It is a sweet, fragrant, salty, and delicious food made from ginger and sweet sticky sauce. The outer layer of the ginger naturally forms a wrinkled, crispy structure with a thick, frost-like sugary coating. The inner layer is slightly brownish like brown sugar, with the core of the ginger showing a red hue through the yellow. When sliced horizontally, the cut surface reveals an interesting interplay of red and yellow. It tastes sweet and fragrant with a hint of saltiness and spice. The flavor touches the tongue and immediately stimulates saliva, making it extremely appetizing. Especially when served with tea in the morning, it feels particularly refreshing—there’s even a saying: “Eating pickled ginger in the morning is better than drinking ginseng soup.” Pickled ginger can also be used as a seasoning. When cooking loach, fish head, or chicken soup, adding an appropriate amount of pickled ginger slices enhances the flavor, eliminates the inherent fishy taste of the chicken, and makes the broth exceptionally fresh, sweet, and aromatic.

　　The production of pickled ginger involves brewing high-quality glutinous rice into "sauce mother" around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival each year. Then, high-quality ginger pieces are selected, peeled, and mixed with the sauce, and processed using traditional methods. The finished product has the appearance of white sugar color with thread-like patterns, while the inside is sauce-brown. It has a balanced sweet and salty taste, is refreshing to eat, and has a slight spiciness. It can be eaten on its own or served as a tea snack. Using ginger to stew chicken or steam meat has functions such as dispelling wind, warming the stomach, refreshing the mind, nourishing the brain, and improving health, and is especially effective in treating dizziness and headaches.