90 Ginger Recipes To Put Some Zing Into Your Menu

Ginger may not look like much on a store shelf or in a produce bin, appearing as a weird lumpy root or a boring beige powder. Its flavor, through, is an entirely different story — zingy, zippy, and guaranteed to wake up even the dullest dish. What's more, ginger has all kinds of health benefits and is something that lasts a good long while, as well. You can store it for up to a month in the fridge or forever and a day in the freezer, but if you choose the latter, Rachael Ray recommends storing ginger peeled before you freeze it.

These dishes here are a roundup of some of the most ginger-influenced recipes we've published to date. They encompass many different types of cuisine and run the gamut from savory to sweet, and main dishes to sides to desserts. Some of the recipes get their flavor from fresh ginger, some from powdered or paste or juice. We've even included a few ginger ale or ginger beer-based beverages as they're sure to appeal to fans of this big, bold flavor.

Lemon is a flavor that's just as assertive as ginger, although in a completely different way. Somehow these two flavors in combination manage not to clash but to complement each other as the sourness of the lemon offsets the pungency of the ginger. This pairing works well in tea, but it's also perfect for baked goods such as these sweet frosted scones. Lemon juice and zest add flavor to the sugar glaze while the scones not only include both ingredients but are also studded with small chunks of candied ginger.

Recipe: French Ginger And Lemon Scones

Plain noodles on their own don't taste like much of anything, but the beauty of this food is how perfectly it pairs with just about everything except maybe chocolate syrup. Here cooked angel hair spaghetti is tossed with a tasty sauce of grated ginger, sesame oil, vinegar, and other seasonings and topped with sesame seeds and scallions. On its own, this dish makes a great side for an Asian-type meal, but you can also add some protein such as chicken or shrimp to turn it into an entrée.

Recipe: Ginger Sesame Noodles

A proper pho involves a wide variety of flavors all playing nicely together. While there are as many different pho recipes as there are cooks, this version is made for the American kitchen so it contains spices and seasonings readily found in most supermarkets. These include cardamon, cinnamon, coriander, star anise, and turmeric — with this last spice, while the fresh kind is called for here, feel free to use the powdered kind if fresh turmeric is too hard to come by. You'll also need to add a few slices of fresh ginger to your pho in order for it to be as flavorful as possible.

Recipe: Pho

Miso paste is typically used as the base for a clear soup, but it can also be put to good use in a salad dressing. In this recipe, the fresh, crunchy salad is a simple one made of packaged spring mix and sliced cucumber. The dressing is slightly more complex as it involves mixing chopped carrots with miso, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and ginger juice. Here the juice is made by squeezing fresh-grated ginger, but you can buy the bottled kind if you want to save a step.

Recipe: Healthy Miso Ginger Salad

Every fruit has its perfect partner. Apples go great with cinnamon, lemons are lovely with lavender, and pumpkins (yes, they're a fruit) were made for pumpkin pie spice, or rather, it was made for them. As for peaches, these pair gorgeously with ginger. This ginger peach recipe, like all dump cakes, was designed to be as easy as possible. This means you'll be using canned peaches, ground ginger, and boxed cake mix so there's just a few minutes' worth of prep. Add in less than an hour's worth of oven time and you'll have a lovely dessert that sings of summer even in midwinter.

Recipe: Ginger Peach Dump Cake

Back in the 20-teens everyone was going gaga over fast food fried chicken sandwiches, but those are so last decade now. Korean fried chicken, that's the thing, although the only problem with this new food fad is that it may not be available to those of us not fortunate enough to live near a Korean restaurant. With this recipe, however, you can DIY your own version of this delicious chicken dish right down to the sticky-sweet, ginger-spicy glaze.

Recipe: Easy Korean Fried Chicken

Ginger and other Asian-inspired ingredients such as mirin, sesame oil, soy sauce, and sriracha are stirred together to make a sauce that perfectly complements a dish of simple baked salmon. This condiment will take the dish and transform it from plain old fish to a meal you'll be excited to eat. You can pair this saucy salmon with rice or noodles or make a low-carb version by chilling both salmon and sauce and using these to top a bed of fresh greens.

Recipe: Easy Fresh Ginger And Salmon

We'll start this recipe with a disclaimer: Mongolian beef as we know it is not really Mongolian, as the dish was created in Taiwan. It is made with real beef, though, and that's the important part. This particular recipe is a copycat of the dish served at American-Chinese chain P.F. Chang's, so if you're familiar with the restaurant version you'll know to expect steak slices in a sticky-sweet soy-based sauce flavored with ginger and just a slight hint of red pepper heat.

Recipe: Easy Mongolian Beef

Gingerbread is something we typically associate with the winter holidays and you probably won't see gingerbread cookies on store shelves at any other time of year. This gingerbread milkshake, however, is actually flavored with a similar cookie called the gingersnap that can be found in the cookie aisle all year long. This means you can make this milkshake in the middle of summer should you start feeling nostalgic for Yuletide festivities. Along with the necessary cookies, the ingredients needed to make it are vanilla ice cream, milk, cinnamon, and ground ginger.

Recipe: Gingerbread Milkshakes

Many a stir-fry or Asian-inspired meat recipe calls for teriyaki sauce, and it's easy enough to reach for a bottle of pre-made mix. When you start making your own condiments, though, that's some next-level cooking. Not all condiments are easy to concoct, it's true, but teriyaki sauce is on the simpler side. All you need to do is to simmer some mirin, soy sauce, and sugar with water, then infuse the mixture with a few slices of fresh ginger as a finishing touch.

Recipe: Traditional Teriyaki Sauce

Curries come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors, but the one thing they usually in common is that they are full of flavor. This chicken curry is no exception. It starts off with a coconut milk sauce, but this mild base is augmented by crushed red pepper, curry powder, garam masala, garlic, and a sizable chunk of fresh ginger. As the dish also contains onions and bell peppers, all you'll need to add is a bowl of rice and you'll have a complete meal.

Recipe: Chicken Curry

Firecracker shrimp sounds like something that would be pretty incendiary, but that's really not the case with our version of the dish. The main source of heat is a small spoonful of sriracha plus a larger amount of sweet chili sauce, a condiment more sugar than spice. The chile flavor may not stand out to any real extent here, but that leaves all the more room for the ginger to shine. While this recipe calls for ginger paste, if you don't have any on hand, there's no need to go out and buy it. Instead, all you'll need to do is to puree some chopped fresh ginger with a few drops of oil for a DIY version.

Recipe: Easy Firecracker Shrimp

Miso soup is a staple served by Japanese restaurants and is something that can help to clear the palate and stimulate the appetite for the dishes to come. If you find that the soup is your favorite part of the meal, though, you might like to try making it at home. This recipe is for a fairly hearty version of the soup complete with noodles and vegetables, with the umami-rich broth being enhanced by ginger juice. While you can grate and strain fresh ginger to make your own juice, you can also use the kind that comes in a bottle.

Recipe: Miso Soup

Who was General Tso, anyway, the Chinese version of Colonel Sanders? We're not sure, but whoever they were, real or fictional, they certainly lent their name to some fine-tasting chicken. General Tso's is a Chinese takeout staple for many, but you can produce a reasonable facsimile of a restaurant version in your own kitchen without too much effort. The chicken itself is fried in a cornstarch coating, but what really makes the dish stand out is a hoisin-based sauce flavored with chiles, garlic, and ginger.

Recipe: Homemade General Tso's Chicken

While ginger ale has a nice subtle spice, ginger beer has a more assertive gingery flavor that's great on its own and even better with a squeeze of fresh lime juice. You can also, of course, throw some vodka in there, too, thus turning the mixture into a classic Moscow Mule. No, you don't need a copper mug to make this cocktail. As it turns out, these mugs were originally meant as a marketing gimmick, although they do help to keep the soda cold. Then again, downing your drink before the ice melts will work just as well.

Recipe: Classic Moscow Mule

Making a gingerbread house tends to be more of an architectural undertaking than a cooking project, but we can't all be culinary Frank Lloyd Wrights. This recipe gives you step-by-step instructions, but even if your cookie castle comes out looking more like a run-down sugar shanty, you shouldn't get too upset about it. The building blocks you're using are made from a tasty gingerbread cookie base, so you can at least enjoy hiding the evidence of your construction calamity.

Recipe: Gingerbread House

Gordon Ramsay is a chef who may be even more famous for his hot temper than for his considerable culinary skills and he's probably not someone who enjoys having other people mess around with his recipes. As we're safely out of his reach, however, we're daring to do so anyway. What tweaks are we making to Ramsay's original tuna tartare recipe? Just one little thing — we're adding some fresh ginger. Even if the irate chef calls us idiot sandwiches, we still feel this makes for quite an improvement.

Recipe: Gordon Ramsay's Tuna Tartare

Butter chicken is a dish with a deceptively simple name. Yes, the recipe involves butter, and yes, it's also made with chicken (either light or dark meat will do). Besides those two ingredients, however, you'll need a laundry list of other ingredients to make butter chicken, most of these being spices and seasonings that are used to flavor the tomato-based sauce. While we won't name them all off here, among the more flavorful elements we're using in our recipe are chiles, garam masala, garlic, and (of course) ginger.

Recipe: Easy Butter Chicken

Ramen noodles are famously a low-budget staple, which is no knock on them. In these days of rising food prices, we're grateful for anything that can fill our bellies without breaking the bank. Still, plain old ramen can get pretty boring, so who couldn't use a few good recipes for dressing it up? Here those basic block noodles are stirred into a broth flavored with garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sriracha, then topped with green onions and sesame seeds. This makes for a tasty Asian-inspired side dish, but if you add in some meat or meat substitute you can turn your noodle bowl into a complete meal.

Recipe: Sesame Garlic Ramen Noodles

This stir-fried beef dish isn't exactly a one-pot meal since you'll actually need two pots to cook it: one to boil the noodles and the other to do all the rest of the work. You're on your own as far as cooking the noodles goes, though we'd suggest you take them out of the water when they're still al dente. Where this recipe kicks off is with marinating a steak in sweetened soy sauce flavored with garlic, ginger, and crushed red pepper. Slice the meat, stir-fry it, then sauté some vegetables. Once you mix everything together with the noodles, dinner's all done and you won't have too many dishes to wash.

Recipe: Classic Beef Stir Fry

This Pad Thai recipe really is an everything but the kitchen sink kind of dish, but in a good way. It's got noodles, tofu, and shrimp, as well as green onions, bean sprouts, and a topping of crunchy peanuts. What really ties the whole dish together, however, is the blend of sweet and spicy seasonings including sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce, tamarind paste (or a DIY substitute made of ketchup and rice vinegar), garlic, and ginger. While this particular pad thai is mild as can be, it's still got plenty of flavor, although you can always add a little heat with chopped chiles, chili-garlic sauce, or sriracha if you wish.

Recipe: Quick Homemade Pad Thai

Mochiko is a type of Japanese sweet rice flour that you may now be able to find in a standard grocery store as well as in an Asian market. Once you've acquired this ingredient, though, what do you do with it? You could always try making your own mochi, but we prefer making this easy mochiko chicken, instead. Chicken chunks are first marinated in a savory blend of mirin and soy sauce seasoned with garlic and ginger, then coated with the rice flour and baked to crunchy perfection. As the flavor's baked into the chicken, you won't even need a dipping sauce!

Recipe: Simple Mochiko Chicken

Saag paneer is a South Asian dish that's not your ordinary stir-fry. For one thing, one of the main ingredients is cheese! The cheese used here is paneer, something that could be said to resemble a more solid, drier form of ricotta. The other main ingredient is spinach and for convenience's sake, we're going with the frozen kind. The spinach and cheese are cooked in a creamy tomato sauce seasoned with a spice blend that includes cumin seeds, garam masala, garlic, ginger, and turmeric. Together all these ingredients make for a fairly simple dish with a complex flavor profile.

Recipe: At-Home Saag Paneer

Whenever you have a cold or flu, someone is bound to suggest you try the universal cure-all known as chicken noodle soup. While the canned kind is convenient and easy enough to fix for yourself even when you're nearly dead on your feet, the taste is somewhat lacking. Here's a better idea: Right now when you're feeling hale and hearty, be proactive by taking a little time to whip up a batch of this Chinese-inspired soup. Freeze single-serving portions, that way you'll have these on hand next time you're under the weather. If there's anything that can get through to your taste buds at such a time, it'll be the garlic and ginger in the broth.

Recipe: Easy Chinese Chicken And Noodle Soup

If you enjoy dipping your chicken nuggets in Chick-fil-A's Polynesian sauce, you're bound to like this sweet and sour sauce as well. While it's not specifically intended as a copycat recipe, you can tell the two sauces are close cousins. Our sauce is made from ketchup, pineapple juice, vinegar, and soy sauce, with a sprinkling of ginger to finish it off. If this strikes you as an odd combination of flavors, just wait until you taste the sauce. You'll see just how well they work together and you just might want to start using this condiment on your egg rolls, wontons, wings, and ribs as well as your chicken nuggets.

Recipe: Sweet And Sour Sauce

Gingerbread ice cream is a specialty flavor that typically only appears in stores and ice cream shops in November and December as the winter holidays draw near. If you have an ice cream maker and are willing to put in a little work, however, you can enjoy a homemade version at any time of year. This gingerbread ice cream does not start with a basic vanilla base with crumbled cookies added in. Instead, the ice cream itself is flavored with ginger and molasses as well as allspice, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. The resulting ice cream is something that will not only appeal to gingerbread fans but to anyone who enjoys spice cake.

Recipe: Gingerbread Ice Cream

Goldfish dumplings? You may be picturing dough stuffed with crushed cheesy Goldfish crackers, but that's not what's going on here. Nor, thankfully, does this recipe include any ingredients that need to be sourced at a pet store. Instead, these Asian-inspired dumplings are stuffed with pork and shrimp seasoned with a mixture of ginger and garlic. They are then formed into little fish shapes, with food coloring helping to give them an appropriately orange hue. If you really want to get cute, you could even float them on a koi pond made of dipping sauce.

Recipe: Goldfish Dumplings

Many standard chili recipes call for beef and beans in a tomato-based sauce, but white chili usually omits the tomatoes and uses lighter meat such as chicken. In this recipe the beans, too, are white, as is the creamy sauce. Our white chili does call for a few typical chili seasonings such as chiles and cumin, but it's also made with some less familiar ones including coriander, oregano, and ginger. Sure, the result is a far cry from the familiar bowl of red, but it tastes just as good and is a little bit lighter, as well.

Recipe: White Chicken Chili

Coronation chicken is a dish that dates back to the first day of the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II and was created especially for that momentous occasion. It's a type of chicken salad flavored with curry powder and fancied up with a couple of add-ins, with the ingredients varying from cook to cook. This recipe uses cilantro, mango chutney, and golden raisins (known as sultanas in the U.K.) and poaches the chicken in a cinnamon-ginger broth.

Recipe: Classic Coronation Chicken

Goa is a region of India that is known for its seafood and this fish curry is inspired by dishes typical of the region. It starts with firm-fleshed white fish cooked in a creamy coconut milk/tomato sauce and spices things up with the addition of curry powder, garlic, and ginger. There's also a small amount of heat from a single chile pepper, but you can dial the level up or down by adjusting the amount you use: half a pepper if you prefer something milder, or two or more peppers for one that's more of a scorcher.

Recipe: Goan Fish Curry

Chicken tikka masala may sound like an Indian dish, but it's one you're more likely to find served up in a British pub than a diner in Delhi or a bistro in Bengaluru. Whatever its provenance, it makes for quite an enticing entrée, although it does take a little time to prepare. It's not that the recipe is difficult as the actual steps involved are quite easy. The flavor, however, comes from a rather lengthy list of spices, seasonings, and aromatics. We won't list all of the ingredients here, but among the star players are cinnamon, curry powder, garam masala, garlic, and, yes, ginger. In fact, this dish has a double dose of our favorite spice as it uses both the fresh and powdered kind.

Recipe: Simple Chicken Tikka Masala

Panang curry is a Thai dish that's sweet and not too spicy, at least in this version. Our recipe is made from chicken breasts simmered in coconut milk that's been flavored with curry paste, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, basil, and ginger. The proportions given here make for a generous eight helpings, but if you're not feeding a crowd, you can always portion out the leftovers into individual serving-size freezer containers. That way, you'll have a stash of microwave meals that taste way better than anything that ever came out of the Lean Cuisine test kitchen.

Recipe: Panang Curry

If you're a fan of Food Network chef Alex Guarnaschelli, you may have watched her prepare her famous stir-fried chicken with a spicy peanut sauce. Be forewarned: While this recipe was inspired by Guarnaschelli's creation, the end result is something completely different. For one thing, our chicken dish retains the garlic, ginger, and pepper that give Guarnaschelli's dish its spice but tempers the heat with coconut milk. What's more, this "stir fry" is actually cooked in an Instant Pot and the coconut milk makes it more curry-like than classic stir-fry. Nonetheless, this chicken with spicy peanut sauce is a very tasty (if distant) cousin of Guarnaschelli's dish of the same name.

Recipe: Alex Guarnaschelli's Chicken Stir Fry With Spicy Peanut Sauce

Korean food has been having a moment recently, and we couldn't be happier that this once-underrated Asian cuisine is finally getting some long overdue recognition. Even if Korean restaurants are yet to open up in every strip mall across the nation, it's generally not too difficult to source ingredients such as the popular gochujang paste to make Korean-inspired dishes at home. This recipe is a particularly easy one as you'll be using a crock pot to cook up some short ribs in beef broth flavored with soy sauce, garlic, and ginger as well as the aforementioned gochujang.

Recipe: Slow-Cooker Korean Short Ribs

What to do with leftover french fries? Many restaurants pile their plates and to-go boxes sky-high with fried potatoes, but the problem is that fries tend to depreciate rapidly within just a few minutes. They're never quite the same when reheated, either, which is why we suggest saving them for lomo saltado instead. This traditional Peruvian dish is made of thin-sliced beef cooked with peppers and tomatoes in a blend of soy sauce and vinegar and seasoned with aji amarillo, ginger, and cilantro. The beauty part is, right before you serve it up, you stir in a bunch of cooked fries. It doesn't matter how fresh they are (or aren't), once the fries hit the sauce, they blend with the beef and spicy gravy to make a dish that puts poutine to shame.

Recipe: Traditional Lomo Saltado (Peruvian Stir-Fried Beef)

Pulled pork from a barbecue restaurant may come from an entire pit-smoked pig, but who's got the time or the space for that? (Not to mention, your local HOA may object to your going whole hog with a complete carcass.) Our far more convenient pulled pork recipe starts with a regular pork roast that's seasoned with dry rub and cooked in the oven. As a bonus, it comes with two different barbecue sauces. One's a pretty typical ketchup/sugar/vinegar one, but the other adds honey and a spoonful of ginger to make for a delightfully different take on the standard sauce.

Recipe: Pulled Pork

Panda Express may well be the king of Chinese-American chains as just about everyone is familiar with its food. Sure, it's not exactly gourmet fare, but sometimes you'll still find yourself craving one of the chain's tried-and-true specialties like Panda Express orange chicken. If you don't feel like going out to eat, though, and you'd rather skip the exorbitant delivery fees, you can make a pretty close copy of the restaurant dish in your own kitchen. The ingredients called for in this copycat orange chicken recipe are all easy-to-come-by items such as orange juice, chili-garlic sauce, and powdered ginger and the result is pretty close to Panda Express's own version. In fact, if you packed this chicken in a paper carton, you could probably pass it off as takeout, but why would you want to? If you make it yourself, you deserve bragging rights.

Recipe: Copycat Panda Express Orange Chicken

Biryani is a classic Indian rice and meat dish that gets its flavor from a complex blend of spices. In this recipe alone, a dozen different ones are employed, including the super-expensive saffron. (Don't want to get out a bank loan for a single seasoning? Double down on the turmeric for a much cheaper substitute with extra health benefits.) Some of these spices, including garam masala, garlic, ginger, are blended with yogurt to make a marinade for the chicken, while others such as cinnamon and bay leaves are added to the rice as it cooks.

Recipe: Chicken Biryani

Bibimbap is a Korean dish that starts with a plain bowl of rice, but is then layered with all kinds of good stuff. With this recipe, the first layer is fried pork belly that's been marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, mirin, and flavorings including the three Gs: garlic, ginger, and gochujang. The meat is then topped with kimchi, sprouts, and lettuce. Finally, this bountiful bowl of bibimbap is finished off with a fried egg and a drizzle of spicy sauce.

Recipe: Easy Bibimbap

Gingerbread persons (or camels, stars, Santas, etc.) are a holiday favorite, but it's not quite the done thing to serve these cookies up as Christmas breakfast and call it a day. Instead, we suggest gingerbread waffles made with a molasses/ginger-spiced-batter as an acceptably festive morning meal. While these waffles go great with a standard maple-flavored pancake syrup or a sprinkling of powdered sugar, you could also dress them up with whipped cream or perhaps even a scoop of eggnog-flavored ice cream.

Recipe: Gingerbread Waffles

If you've only ever had egg drop soup in a restaurant, you may know how good it tastes, but you won't know what fun it is to make. The soup in this recipe starts with chicken broth that's simmered with ginger and soy sauce to give it plenty of flavor, but the fun part comes when you add in the eggs. First you beat them, then slowly drizzle them into the soup with one hand as you stir with the other. Within seconds, the eggs will separate into ghostly-looking wisps that drift around the soup pot. Tame those egg ghosts with a handful of chopped scallions, then eat that spooky soup while it's hot.

Recipe: 30 Minute Egg Drop Soup

Gingerbread men — or persons — are a tradition that dates back to Tudor times. While recipes for gingerbread may vary, nearly all of them include ground ginger, while many are flavored with molasses, as well. In this recipe, we're going extra-spicy with the dough, adding allspice, cloves, and nutmeg to the aforementioned ingredients. The dough itself is nice and sturdy for shaping your gingerbread creations, be they persons, animals, or other holiday shapes.

Recipe: Gingerbread Men

Carrots may seem like a weird ingredient to add to pancakes, but not when you add the magic word "cake." Once upon a time carrot cake itself probably seemed like a weird concept, too, but by now we've all embraced it as a perfectly valid flavor. The carroty pancake batter in this recipe is spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger and also includes some chopped walnuts to add a little crunch — no raisins, but you can stir in a handful if you wish. The best part of a carrot cake, though, is the tangy cream cheese frosting which is repurposed here as a pancake topping.

Recipe: Carrot Cake Pancakes

Jajangmyeon is a Korean dish with an interesting story behind it. It seems that Valentine's Day in Korea isn't strictly for couples, nor is it limited to just one day. There are multiple "love holidays," but one of the most popular is known as Black Day and is meant for single people to celebrate that status. How better to demonstrate some self-love than by diving into a tasty plate of noodles smothered in a gingery pork belly/black bean sauce? Yes, this dish, known as jajangmyeon, is the traditional holiday feast for the annual celebration of uncoupledness. While it may seem a bit ironic that our recipe is meant to serve four, it makes great leftovers so solo diners can enjoy it for several days.

Recipe: Traditional Jajangmyeon

While the McDonald's menu generally runs to foods best suited to ketchup, they do branch out into different condiments for their McNuggets. These condiments come and go, but one of them, a Szechuan sauce created as part of a promo for the movie "Mulan," became an unlikely cult classic years after being discontinued due to having a cameo role in a "Rick and Morty" cartoon. While Mickey D's has since revived the sauce several times, it's still not that easy to come by. If you're a super fan of the stuff, you'll be glad to know that you can always DIY your own McDonald's Szechuan sauce. This copycat recipe does call for a fair number of ingredients including garlic, ginger, coriander, Szechuan peppercorns, lime juice, and several different types of vinegar, but the result is a great-tasting sauce that you won't have to order through an app.

Recipe: Copycat McDonald's Szechuan Sauce