Adventures in Cooking: Chocolate Covered Ginger

Most of my Adventures in Cooking! are born out of necessity—the necessity to get rid of a specific pesky ingredient in my possession. But more often lately, I've been experiencing necessity of a different sort—the necessity of having a food I can't buy ready-made.

While I can supply most of my basic needs at the local supermarkets, it recently came to my attention that certain dietary staple had become scarce everywhere: chocolate-covered ginger.

Now you might be thinking, "I never knew chocolate-covered ginger was a basic need," and you'd be mostly right. But when your will to live is contingent on satisfying your very selective sweet tooth, then chocolate-covered ginger becomes a bona fide requirement. And when my supply of it ran out this summer, I found myself in the throes of a chocolate-covered-ginger emergency!

Chocolate-covered-ginger – we'll call it CCG for short because that makes it sound like a drug, and this the story of my addiction – was the food I never knew I needed until I ran out of it. I discovered its existence when I first started working at the organic market 15 years ago, and I was surprised to discover I enjoyed the tingly feeling of ginger and the crunchy feeling of sugar granules and the euphoric snap of dark chocolate all combined in one. But I didn't eat it that often, so it took me probably two years to consume my last quarter-pound tub of the stuff.

Once it was gone, I kinda-sorta started missing it, so I put it on my grocery list to buy again when I had the chance. For months, I never had the chance. At Mom's Organic Market, my former source of it, the CCG shelf remained puzzlingly empty for weeks on end. I took a trip to the Amish market, where bulk snacks and candies of all sorts can be found, and eventually discovered a shelf labeled "chocolate covered ginger," but what was on that shelf were some mysterious chocolate spheres the size of marbles—not the oversized sheets of ginger and chocolate that I knew and loved. Surely those balls were something else, taking up the place of a product that was temporarily out of stock, just as the CCG had been at MOM's.

But then, weeks later, I noticed the CCG shelf at MOM's had been refilled...with the same tiny chocolate spheres I'd seen at the Amish market. This was not a good sign. It meant that chocolate-covered ginger slices had been discontinued and replaced with balls...and chocolate-covered ginger balls were not at all what I wanted!

Now you might be thinking, "So what? Your ginger comes in ball form instead of sheet form. I think you'll survive," and you'd be right. But my very selective sweet tooth only enjoys foods that it can nibble on, and tiny candies that must be eaten whole do not meet that qualification. I don't waste my time (or my limited carbs-quota) on sweets that aren't truly a treat in every way, so (as soon as I had confirmed that the sliced variety was not available online either), CCG was effectively off the table.

You might be thinking that would be good for my aforementioned carbs-quota, since I wouldn't be squandering any of it on chocolate-covered ginger, but alas, that was not the case. Scarcity drives demand, and I could not get the visions of CCG to stop dancing in my head.

However, it's not actually that hard to cover anything in chocolate, I reasoned. So I decided to make my own! The results of this Adventure in Craving Cooking are this very simple recipe:

Chocolate Covered Something-or-other

Ingredients:

• Candied/crystallized ginger slices (or whatever else you feel like coating with chocolate)
• Chocolate chips (however much you estimate will cover the amount of something-or-other you're using)

Steps:

1. Prepare a surface where the chocolate-covered something can cool and harden. I used a very shabby old silicone baking mat.
2. Melt chocolate chips. I hope I don't have to explain how to melt chocolate? There are tons of tutorials out there.
3. Using a spoon, spread melted chocolate over the entirety of each something-or-other (except the part where you're holding it between your fingers—it's fine to just leave that uncovered)
4. Place chocolate-covered somethings on your work surface, making sure not to let them touch.
5. Allow to harden in the refrigerator.
6. When they are fully cooled, peel them away from the surface and enjoy!

Chef's tip: If you end up with leftover chocolate, you can spread it onto a flexible object such as a plastic lid or the same silicone baking sheet. Then when it's hard, you can break it into chunks and use it in brownies, or just save it for the next time you're jonesing for chocolate-covered anything, cause now you have a foolproof recipe for making it!