I decided to make some ginger beer, and now I have about 5 oz. of the hand of ginger left. What should I do with it?
(Oh, and would just a touch of cayenne pepper be out of place in the ginger beer? I can never seem to get it ‘hot’ enough.)
Freeze it and use it later. You can even grate it when it is frozen.
I would suggest getting rid of the rest of the body, along with the hands.
Use it to make Chinese stir fry dishes. It’s an essential ingredient.
Mix with brown sugar and soy sauce and apply to salmon
We had salmon last night. I’ve never made Chinese stir-fry, so I have no recipes. I guess that leaves freezing it. I’ll wrap the cut ends and do that.
I did ad a smidgen of cayenne to the ginger beer.
I store it in whole pieces in some vodka and it seems to work reasonably well as a replacement when out of the fresh stuff.
Bonus: ginger infused vodka! 
I freeze it, since I can never seem to buy the right amount for one dish, and I never use it often enough to keep it fresh. Never thought about grating it while frozen though; I’ll have to try that!
I keep a big hand in the freezer, just thrown in a freezer bag. I grate it on my Microplane for use in stir fries, peanut sauce, etc. It works beautifully. You just have to remember that the snowdrift of grated ginger is very fluffy, so if your recipe calls for a certain volume, it won’t really correspond. You could wait for it to thaw or tamp it down into a paste. I just grate a ton extra, because my motto in life is there’s no such thing as too much ginger.
My dear friend was just telling me that she made some ginger simple syrup and adds it to Vanilla Stoli. Sounds great!
I always have too much ginger left over after recipes, but then I have it on hand to treat nausea.
Yep, this is how we handle it in our household exactly. It’s always available on hand.
I suggest making candied ginger.
I’d rather have Leftover Ginger than Secondhand Rosemary.
I cooked with frozen galangal for the first time the other day - it’s much easier to peel and chop when frozen and tastes just as good.
It’s also essential in a lot of Indian dishes, if you’ve ever made those. I could easily tear through 5 oz of ginger if I’m cooking either Chinese or Indian dishes. Even some Thai, where galangal is more often used, ginger works well for one of the aromatic components.
Have you done any kinds of stir fry?