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.

While ginger may have a strong, assertive flavor, it's surprisingly gentle on your stomach. This seasoning was a superfood long before the term was coined and is known for helping with digestion, combating nausea, and relieving aches and pains. While this particular ginger tea recipe is fancied up with dried orange peel for some extra flavor, this ingredient is not strictly necessary in order to make a soothing tonic. All you really need is a little fresh ginger steeped in hot water and seasoned with honey and lemon.

Recipe: Soothing Ginger Root Tea

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

Ginger is a popular spice in Chinese food and is used to good effect here in this Asian-inspired stir fry. Fresh grated ginger combines with garlic, red pepper flakes, soy sauce, and rice vinegar to create a sauce that's a little bit spicy and a little bit sweet that turns plain chicken into a meal to rival the food served up by your favorite carryout restaurant. Add a side of rice or noodles and you're all set for dinner, although you might want to add in a few vegetables to make your mom  (or doctor) happy.

Recipe: Takeout-Inspired Chinese Chicken

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

What would the holidays be without gingerbread? Gingerbread cookies, as their name implies, are indeed flavored with their eponymous spice. In addition to ground ginger, the main ingredient providing that typical gingerbread cookie flavor here is molasses. One word of warning before you go grocery shopping: Do not use blackstrap molasses! While that stuff may be super-healthy, it's far too bitter to be used in baked goods. You want the ginger flavor to shine here — the cookies aren't called molassesbread, after all. In order to allow this, you should opt for the milder type of molasses meant for baking.

Recipe: Gingerbread Cookies

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

Ginger plays very nicely with most vegetables, but it also enhances certain fruits, as well. In this recipe, a sweet mango-based chutney gets a little extra zip from fresh ginger as well as some pungency from red onions and a bit of heat from crushed red pepper. Try this chutney as a topping for grilled fish or chicken, to accompany cheese and crackers, or perhaps even in a fusion quesadilla made with brie cheese.

Recipe: Sweet And Savory Mango Chutney

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

What makes pot stickers so darn delicious? While just about any fried dumpling is bound to be tasty, with these ones, it's the generous amount of grated ginger that gives the ground chicken filling some extra oomph. For a super-simple dipping sauce, try mixing equal parts of sriracha or chili-garlic sauce with soy sauce or tamari, then add a small pinch of sugar, maybe a drizzle of sesame oil or splash of rice vinegar, then spice it up with — yes! — more grated ginger.

Recipe: Easy Chicken Pot Stickers

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

We're fans of five-spice powder and feel it pairs particularly well with pork (as in this stir-fry), but we'd like it even better if it was six-spice powder, instead. The five spices this Chinese blend contains are cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds, star anise, and Szechuan peppercorns, but we feel it could also use a little gingering up, as well. In this recipe, fresh ginger is used to do just that, while garlic and crushed red pepper make for spices number seven and eight.

Recipe: 5-Spice Pork Stir Fry

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

As every budget gourmet knows, the best way to jazz up a basic bowl of ramen is by adding an egg. For a major upgrade, though, what you'll want are ramen eggs like the ones in this recipe. While they do take time to make, most of it is hands-off as the soft-boiled eggs marinate in a blend of mirin, sake, soy sauce, sugar, and ginger. Even the kind of ramen noodles that come in blocks priced at three for a buck will taste like gourmet fare once you drop a ginger-spiced egg into the bowl.

Recipe: Ajitsuke Tamago (Ramen Eggs)

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

Pho can be made with all manner of meats, but here we're sticking with chicken. While the recipe calls for boneless thighs or breasts, for a more budget-friendly version you can also use bone-in meat. (Bonus: The bones will make the broth more flavorful and nutritious, to boot!) As for what makes this pho so aromatic, yep, you guessed it, fresh ginger plays a significant role along with chiles, cloves, coriander, five-spice powder, garlic, star anise, and other ingredients too numerous to mention. Needless to say, this soup isn't something you can make in a hurry as digging through your spice cabinet alone may take a while. The results, however, will be worth the time and effort.

Recipe: Aromatic Chicken Pho

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

Bourbon chicken, which may be one of our favorite food court Chinese dishes, does not take its name from the type of whiskey. Instead, it was named after a street in New Orleans, although the dish really isn't what you'd call Cajun or Creole, either. In this particular recipe, bourbon is used as an ingredient, although if you prefer to make yours alcohol-free, you can always replace the liquid with water, instead. Ginger, brown sugar, honey, rice vinegar, and soy sauce make for a sauce that's plenty flavorful all on its own.

Recipe: Sweet And Tangy Bourbon Chicken

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

Some recipes use ginger very sparingly (way too sparingly, as far as we're concerned), but not this one. Two whole tablespoons of chopped fresh ginger, now that's what we're talking about! Despite the word "spicy" in the title, though, this dish isn't particularly fiery as the only heat apart from ginger zing comes from a very small amount of chili-garlic sauce. Other flavors at play here in this chef-created recipe include dry sherry, hoisin sauce, and even ketchup, all combining to make a piquant sauce for a simple stir-fried chicken dish.

Recipe: Grace Young's Spicy Ginger Chicken With Peppers And Baby Bok Choy

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

If you're a ginger fan, and it's likely you are if you're still with us this far, you probably enjoy a good ginger-flavored soda such as ginger ale. You may also like using it as a cocktail mixer, which is what we're doing here. Our favorite fizzy drink is spiked with a shot of Japanese whisky, making for a super-simple two-ingredient cocktail. If you want to get fancy, this recipe also includes directions for lighting a lemon twist on fire to add some smoky citrus flavor to the drink. If you'd rather just double down on the ginger, though, you could instead concoct a garnish out of the candied kind.

Recipe: Japanese Whisky Highball Recipe

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

These noodles may be drunken, but you won't be after you eat them since each serving contains just ¼ ounce of sherry. In fact, you'll barely taste the booze at all as the sherry is just one of the flavoring elements along with fish sauce, chili-garlic sauce, garlic, and ginger. While you can use fresh-grated ginger in this recipe, you can also use ginger paste from a jar or a tube so as to save yourself a little prep work.

Recipe: Drunken Noodles

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

Homemade egg rolls are a bit trickier to make than simply heating up the frozen kind or ordering takeout, but they're really quite doable as long as you use store-bought egg roll wrappers. If you're an aspiring Martha Stewart, you could always try making your own wrappers, but that's one of those things that falls under the heading of way too much work for most of us. Instead, we'd rather concentrate on the filling. While egg rolls can be stuffed with just about anything, here we're going old school with a classic mix of ground chicken, shredded carrots, and cabbage flavored with garlic and ginger.

Recipe: Easy Chicken Egg Rolls

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

Quick and easy desserts are perfect for summertime when you want to maximize your outdoor fun time and minimize time spent putzing around in a hot kitchen. Summer also just so happens to be peach season, so we put these two things together and came up with a fresh peach dessert that can be ready in approximately a quarter of an hour. The peaches are sliced, sweetened, and simmered until soft, then topped with crumbled ginger snaps. In order to ginger this up a bit more, you could also add a sprinkle of the powdered stuff to the peaches as they cook.

Recipe: 15-Minute Peach Crumble

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

Dal is an Indian dish made from dried legumes such as peas or lentils and this version, as the title implies, is made from red lentils. It's also an entirely vegan dish as the lentils are cooked in a sauce of coconut milk, tomatoes, and vegetable broth. This dal actually gets a double dose of coconut, as healthy coconut oil is used to sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, and dried spices that give the dish its flavor. While dal can make a great side dish for a curry or other South Asian dish, the lentils give it sufficient protein to make for a meat-free entrée, as well.

Recipe: Coconut Red Lentil Dal

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

Beef noodle soup might sound like a meatier spin on a basic chicken noodle soup, but not in this recipe. This winter warmer is Asian-inspired and is made with steak strips marinated in soy sauce and cooked in a broth flavored with anise, chiles, five-spice powder, garlic, and ginger. One note on the recipe: while it calls for egg noodles, it's not referring to the wide, flat kind used in German cooking. Instead, the soup pictured here is made with long, thin Chinese egg noodles. If you can't find this ingredient, though, rice noodles or vermicelli make a fine substitute.

Recipe: Spicy Beef And Noodles Soup

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

While teriyaki chicken is Japanese in origin, here we're giving it a tropical spin with the addition of some fresh pineapple. Don't let the word "grilled" in the title throw you off, though — this dish is actually cooked on the stovetop, instead. Chicken thighs, pineapple, and bell peppers are simmered in a mixture of soy sauce, pineapple juice, brown sugar, and ginger to make a dish that's sweet and tangy and just perfect for a rice bowl.

Recipe: Grilled Pineapple Teriyaki Chicken

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

Snickerdoodles are a simple cookie with a silly name, but they're easy to make and taste fantastic. With this recipe, we're making this classic cookie even better by adding some pumpkin to the mix. While these pumpkin cookies still retain the traditional cinnamon-sugar coating that sets snickerdoodles apart from standard sugar cookies, the cinnamon flavor is supplemented with a selection of other pumpkin-friendly spices including ground cloves, nutmeg, and ginger.

Recipe: Best Pumpkin Snickerdoodles

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

Some dieters complain that cauliflower rice is no substitute for the real thing as it's not really very rice-like when eaten on its own. When it's used to replace the starch in a dish like fried rice, however, it can be quite satisfying. In this low-carb recipe, cauliflower rice is combined with sauteed onions, carrots, edamame, and scrambled eggs and seasoned with soy sauce, garlic, and ginger. The result, while not an exact dupe for real fried rice, makes for a side dish that manages to be flavorful as well as healthy.

Recipe: Vegetable Fried Cauliflower Rice

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

Batter-fried chicken chunks in a sauce that's orange in color as well as flavor may not be considered fine dining, it's true. In fact, orange chicken as we know it may even have originated at Panda Express, a fast casual chain. Whatever its provenance, this sweet and tangy chicken dish is now a popular staple of takeout menus everywhere. Delivery fees can get expensive, though, so orange chicken fans are advised to try making a homemade version of their go-too order with this not-too-complicated recipe. Our take on orange chicken isn't overly spicy, calling for just a pinch of crushed red pepper, but it gets plenty of zing from a few spoonfuls of grated ginger.

Recipe: Homemade Orange Chicken

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

While pressure cookers like the Instant Pot aren't the best method of cooking every type of food, there are a few things they do particularly well, and one is to cook the dried beans and legumes used to make dal makhani. In this recipe, the Indian dish is made with lentils and kidney beans cooked in a sauce made of canned tomatoes seasoned with a whole bunch of spices including chili powder, coriander, cumin, garam masala, garlic, and ginger. The resulting dish is budget-friendly, vegan, protein-packed, and flavorful as all get-out.

Recipe: Instant Pot Dal Makhani

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

Every winter, a certain coffee chain trots out its line of seasonal flavors, among these a gingerbread-spiced latte. While gingerbread-flavored coffee makes for a pretty tasty drink, coffee-flavored gingerbread makes an even better cupcake. The batter in this recipe is made with a blend of spices including allspice, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger as well as molasses (the baking kind) and espresso powder adding the latte component. The icing on the cake, literally as well as metaphorically, is a cream cheese frosting similar to the kind you'd find on a carrot cake. If you want to dress these cupcakes up for the holidays, though, adding a mini gingerbread person on top would look really cute.

Recipe: Gingerbread Latte Cupcakes

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

While many types of curry are thick and stew-like, this curry is thinner, making it into a soup. The dish is made with a green beans, scallions, and cauliflower cooked in a creamy base of coconut milk and canned tomatoes, with curry paste and fresh lime and ginger juice lending some Thai-inspired flavor. If you want a heartier curry, you could add a few more vegetables or maybe some tofu to keep this dish plant-based, or you could toss in some chicken or shrimp for a non-vegan version.

Recipe: Thai Curry Soup

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

Poor old bran muffins, they're seldom anyone's first choice. If there's a box of muffins in the break room, the double chocolate may be the first to go, followed by the blueberry and then the banana nut. The bran ones, though, may linger until afternoon sets in as not only do they have the dreaded "healthy" reputation, but they frequently have a flavor to match. The ones in this recipe, however, are not only good for you but taste good, too. The reason for this is that the batter is enhanced with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

Recipe: Spiced Bran Muffins

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

While the fried rice that you get in a restaurant typically includes small chunks of meat, this version is made with ground pork, instead. This means that yes, you can easily swap out the pork for ground chicken, turkey, or even beef if you prefer. In addition to the meat, this fried rice is also packed with green onions, peas, and carrots. What really gives the dish its flavor, however, is a quintet of Chinese-inspired ingredients consisting of oyster sauce, rice wine, soy sauce, garlic, and grated fresh ginger.

Recipe: Quick Pork Fried Rice

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

Wonton soup served up by a Chinese restaurant may be something most vegetarians can't eat. Not only is the broth likely to be meat-based, but the dumplings themselves may be filled with ground meat, as well. Wontons are actually fairly simple to DIY, though, as long as you use store-bought wrappers. With this recipe, the soup is made from spinach and bok choy, while the wontons themselves are filled with cabbage, carrots, and mushrooms and flavored with ginger and gochugaru. The resulting soup is very healthy, tasty, and 100% vegan.

Recipe: Vegetable Wonton Soup

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

This chicken vindaloo, we admit, isn't the simplest of recipes — it's "easy" in the sense of being "fairly easy for a vindaloo" rather than "stir these three things together and get ready to chow down." This recipe has no fewer than 17 different ingredients, as it consists of chicken and vegetables flavored with a multifarious blend of spices and seasonings including chiles, cinnamon, coriander, garlic, ginger, mustard powder, and much, much more. Once you've rounded up the ingredients and performed the necessary measuring and chopping, though, the actual cooking is done in a crockpot, so that's pretty easy. What's more, after a few hours of simmering, the vindaloo will taste so darn good you'll be glad you put in the time on the prep work.

Recipe: Easy Chicken Vindaloo

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

Do you like to drink chai tea after you do your tai chi? Even if you're not a practitioner of this mildest of martial arts, you'll likely appreciate a cup of something warm and spicy on a chilly day. In order to chai-ify your tea, you'll be using a selection of spices including cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and pepper. Sweeten the tea with honey and vanilla, then sip it slowly to savor all of the different flavors.

Recipe: Warm And Spicy Chai Tea

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

Pepper steak is a tale of two recipes. There's the classic French steak au poivre, which consists of steak sauced with rich, peppery cream, and then there's the Asian-style dish made of sliced beef with bell peppers. This recipe is for the latter kind, with the meat and peppers being simmered for hours in a blend of soy and Worcestershire sauces seasoned with garlic, ginger, honey, and pepper. The good thing about this slow cooker recipe is that you can use a cheaper cut of beef since the low and slow cooking will not only impart a whole lot of flavor but should tenderize even the toughest meat.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Pepper Steak

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

'Ginger and chocolate might sound like a slightly unusual flavor combination, but it's actually one that works quite well. With these cookies, the chocolate we're using is the very mild white variety which simply adds another layer of sweetness to counteract the sharper ginger flavor. Sure, you could start with store-bought gingersnaps to make this treat, but this recipe starts from scratch to produce a cookie that's far more satisfying than anything that comes out of a box or bag.

Recipe: White Chocolate-Dipped Gingersnaps

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

Meatballs typically come in two types: Italian ones that may be served, as the old camp song goes, "on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese," or IKEA-style Swedish ones that come with brown gravy and lingonberry sauce. Here. however, we're going in a different direction from those familiar standbys with an Asian-inspired meatball recipe. These meaty morsels are topped with a teriyaki glaze made with soy sauce, honey, and powdered ginger, but for a little extra zing, you could even stir a pinch of ginger into the ground beef mixture.

Recipe: Teriyaki Meatballs

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

While this soba noodle salad can make a satisfying side dish for an Asian-style meal, it also stands on its own as a vegan entrée thanks to the generous helping of peanut butter used in the dressing. In addition to protein-packed peanut butter, the dressing is also flavored with soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, garlic, and ginger, while the noodles in the salad are supplemented with a bunch of healthy vegetables including cucumbers, bell peppers, and kale.

Recipe: Peanut Soba Noodle Salad

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

To start by answering the obvious question, the reason why the pork in this recipe gets cooked two times is that it's super-fatty pork belly. The first time meat meets heat is with an initial boiling that not only tenderizes it but helps to melt off some of the fat. Once boiled, the pork belly goes into a frying pan along with green onions, garlic, ginger, and a soy-based stir-fry sauce. After this second cooking, the meat is served with a side of sautéed cabbage and maybe some rice to make a complete meal.

Recipe: Twice Cooked Pork With Cabbage

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

The holiday season can be tough on people with gluten sensitivity. Parties and get-togethers all seem to involve giant platters of festively-decorated cookies, but which ones are safe to eat? Even if you yourself don't have a problem with gluten, you can be a holiday hero by baking up a big batch of these gluten-free gingerbread cookies and prominently labeling them as such. While these cookies have all of the ginger flavor and soft, chewy texture of traditional gingerbread. the recipe was developed with gluten-free flour so is guaranteed to work with that ingredient.

Recipe: Gluten-Free Gingerbread Cookies

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

So many meat dishes seem to come with a side of starch, particularly anything handheld such as a sandwich or burrito. One way you can ditch the carbs is to use a lettuce leaf in place of a bun. The lettuce wraps in this recipe are filled with a mildly-spicy blend of chicken marinated in coconut milk and soy sauce seasoned with curry powder and ginger. They come with a dipping sauce, too, a peanut-based one such as the kind that's served with satay. 

Recipe: Satay-Style Chicken Lettuce Wraps

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)

If you're a fan of fusion cooking, you'll definitely want to try this soy-braised oxtail. While oxtail is typically used in Caribbean cooking, the rest of this recipe is based on a Korean short rib dish. The ingredients called for here include some you may never have tried in combination before, including pears, mushrooms, daikon, and pine nuts. The sauce, however, is a familiar blend of soy sauce, mirin, garlic, and ginger sweetened with honey and ties all of the disparate strands into a harmonious whole.

Recipe: Soy-Braised Oxtail

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

Hot chocolate is not often thought of as a healthy beverage, but the one in this gingerbread-flavored vegan recipe is an exception to that rule. It's made with a base of coconut milk and contains a good dose of blackstrap molasses, which is the super-strong kind that's typically consumed for its nutritional benefits. Maple syrup helps to temper the bitterness of the blackstrap, while allspice, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger lend this drink a flavor reminiscent of Christmas cookies.

Recipe: Gingerbread Hot Chocolate

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

Before you dismiss the idea of pumpkin spice ramen as one more example that the pumpkin spice craze has jumped the shark, hear us out: This savory noodle dish is no joke as it actually puts those familiar spices and canned pumpkin to use in a new and entirely different way. Nutmeg is absent, but cinnamon, cloves, and fresh ginger are combined with anise, cardamon, and cumin in a base of coconut milk. Lemongrass, lime juice, soy sauce, and jalapeños also go into the soup, resulting in noodles that taste nothing whatsoever like a PSL but instead make for a refreshing Asian-inspired spin on familiar fall flavors.

Recipe: Pumpkin Spice Ramen

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

Making your own donuts may seem like a project that's better outsourced to the pros at Dunkin and Krispy Kreme. Still, when is the last time you saw a carrot cake donut offered at either establishment? They may offer such a thing from time to time, but if you learn to make your own you can have these delicious (and slightly nutritious) donuts whenever you wish. The gingery, cinnamony, and carroty batter in this recipe is baked, not fried, but the pièce de résistance is the cream cheese glaze that's drizzled over the donuts when they come out of the oven.

Recipe: Carrot Cake Baked Donuts

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

Spring rolls, unlike egg rolls, are generally not fried and in fact may not be cooked at all. The result is a translucent dish that shows off the contents inside. The spring rolls in this recipe are filled with a vibrant mixture of pink shrimp, orange carrots, and green cucumber, mint, and cilantro leaves arranged atop a bed of super-thin rice noodles that have been sauteed in ginger-infused sesame oil. The result is an appetizer that is both colorful and flavorful, especially when served with the accompanying peanut/hoisin dipping sauce (recipe included).

Recipe: Shrimp Spring Roll

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

Here are the key points about this recipe: It can be ready in under 20 minutes and is made entirely from scratch with no bottled condiments needed! So how do you pull this off? It's simple — start with chunks of boneless, skinless chicken and shallow-fry them in hot oil. Finish the dish by simmering the chicken in a quick DIY teriyaki sauce made from garlic, ginger, honey, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. Add rice or noodles and you'll have a low-effort, high-quality meal that makes for great-tasting leftovers, as well.

Recipe: Classic Teriyaki Chicken

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

Egg rolls make for a tasty appetizer, but they don't make for much of a main dish. This may be due in part to the fact that the crispy shells tend to lose a bit of their crunch after a few minutes. With this recipe, however, egg roll-type fillings are tossed together to make up a salad bowl. The cabbage, carrots, and ground pork are flavored with an Asian-inspired combo of chili paste, ginger, garlic, soy, and oyster sauces and stirred together for a tasty low-carb entrée. If you want to stretch this egg roll bowl out to make more servings, though, you can add a bottom layer of noodles or rice.

Recipe: 20-Minute Egg Roll In A Bowl

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

Pumpkin and ginger is a flavor combo that can go both sweet or savory as it works equally well in both pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup. Here we have the latter, a fall-flavored soup made with a creamy coconut milk base. This hearty soup is bulked up with white beans as well and also includes miso paste and pumpkin seeds to give it an added protein boost. As this soup is both meat and dairy-free, it could serve as a light entrée for a plant-based meal.

Recipe: Creamy Pumpkin Soup

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

Earlier on this list we featured bourbon chicken made with actual bourbon, but this recipe is closer to the food court staple we know and love. This entirely booze-free chicken dish instead gets its tangy-sweet flavor from a mixture of apple juice, vinegar, soy sauce, and ketchup spiced up with garlic, ginger, and crushed red pepper. Don't let the long ingredient list scare you off as you read through the recipe — this dish is actually quite easy to make and comes together in under half an hour.

Recipe: Sweet Bourbon Chicken

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

When we see the word "spicy" we typically interpret this to mean incendiary, if not outright five-alarm fire in the mouth. Mild food fans may rest assured that this is not the case with this shrimp bowl. The only real fire comes from a small spoonful of sriracha, a sauce that's sweeter than heat. If you extend the definition of spicy to include flavor provided by other spices, though, then this dish surely fits the bill since the ginger and garlic combine with honey, rice wine, and soy sauce to make this shrimp and vegetable medley as delicious as it is nutritious.

Recipe: Spicy Shrimp Bowl

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