Ginger and garlic are discovered together so often in South Asian dishes that many cooks keep a jar of homemade ginger-garlic paste in their fridge, both to save themselves the step of peeling and mashing ginger and garlic every time they go to cook and to incorporate flavor more smoothly and evenly. “If I cook just with ginger, I generally end up with minimal stringy pieces of ginger in the food, and you must be truly careful with how you use [chopped or sliced] garlic since it burns so quickly,” Irani says. “This paste is the ideal marriage of both. It has its own taste and smell, but it’s just ginger and garlic.”
The formula is as simple as it comes: equal parts peeled ginger and peeled garlic, blitzed together in a food processor with a preserving element. Irani’s recipe is more of a mandate than a list of instructions: Don’t over think it. “If someone asks, ‘How much?’” he says, eyeballing it in one of his Instagram Lives, “I’d probably say a cup and a half of ginger, a cup and a half of garlic, and a half cup of liquid a quarter cup of white vinegar and a quarter cup of water.” On the phone, he tells me that folks could instead add a little oil and a tiny bit of lime juice, barely to get the food processor moving; in my own apartment, I also add a little salt, which Irani doesn’t necessarily recommend himself: “I need control of my seasoning as I’m cooking, and that would be just one more variable that [already] has salt in it.”
Before the pandemic, I rarely made it in large quantities because I feared I dreaded I wouldn’t go through it in enough time I just wasn’t cooking all that much at home. But, nowadays, I make it by the container, using it as a base to build flavor.
Ginger-garlic paste, Irani says, is also an incredible marinade. Some Indian dishes like tandoori chicken call for it as the first of two: “The first marinade is usually ginger & garlic pastes and/or lime juice, turmeric, and chili powder. And afterward you come in and do your second marinade, which is your tandoori marinade.
