Nigel Slater’s recipes for pickled ginger and baked chicken wings

Satisfy your tastebuds with two recipes bursting with flavour

It is all over in seconds. A salty anchovy snatched from its tin; a jagged crumb of Parmesan, or a snaffled umeboshi plum. Sometimes it is the sour heat of a slice of vinegary cucumber, the one they call bread and butter pickle. I can conduct a hot and salty fridge raid in the blink of an eye. All too often it is the lid from the sushi ginger that gets unscrewed, the sweet heat of the satin-soft slices of root stopping me in my tracks.

But if I am looking for something a little more serious, it will be the homemade pickled ginger I head for, the one steeped in rice vinegar and orange, and whose ivory surface is shot through with the magenta of a few slices of stowaway beetroot. The introduction of the red root calms the ginger down, which tends to be much hotter and less sweet than the commercial versions. Use more sugar if you like a sweeter version. You could also cool the ginger down a little by using a larger ratio of beetroot. I don’t trust myself to use a mandolin slicer, but one would be ideal for cutting the ginger very finely, should you have such kitchen kit. A jar of preserved ginger lasts for ages and perks up a mackerel fillet or a bowl of steamed rice like little else.

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