Aromatics

Garlic and Ginger are what we normally think of for aromatics in Chinese cooking. 

The grocery store is full of convenience items for managing these as many people think they're tedious ingredients. Jars of pre-peeled garlic cloves, even jars of minced garlic and another of minced ginger. But they're both pretty easy to cook with from fresh garlic and ginger.

For ginger, I prefer to cut off what I need and then further prepare it.

If it's just a "coin"--a US Quarter sized slice--I'll cut it off, then trim away the peel.

For larger amounts, I prefer to cut off a chunk, or knob and peel it with the edge of a spoon.

I'm still figuring out this camera and my lighting so you'll see some color shifts in the following. I apologize.

From there I can cut rounds of the appropriate thickness.

For a small amount of minced ginger, an easy technique is to smack the rounds of ginger with the flat of the blade.

This breaks up their structure. If you smack it at a slight angle so it also drags across the ginger, it breaks up the ginger even more. If needed, you can run the knife through it in some quick chops.

If I need more ginger, or strips or a lot of minced ginger, I prefer to slice the knob of ginger into thin planks as the first step.

Stack them, or if the stack isn't stable orient them lengthwise and overlapping in a shingled manner. Then it's easy to slice them into thin strips.

For a mince, orient the strands all in the same direction, then cut across the strips in small steps to form the fine dice or mince further as needed.

For garlic, the steps are pretty similar. Smack the garlic clove at a slight angle with the flat of the knife to break it up and free it from its skin. Pick out the skin.

Chop through the garlic a couple of times to form the rough mince.

Once:

Twice:

If you need a finer mince, drag the edge of the knife across the garlic while pressing on the knife with one hand.

Scoop it up and place it with your ginger.

For a stock or soup, you usually want to add some aromatics too. But it you usually don't want to leave them in the stock or soup with the other ingredients.

I like to us a teaball to convert a western stock into Chinese stock. I load the teaball with crushed garlic, ginger, and sometimes some star anise. The teaball makes it easy to remove all the aromatics in one step.

Here I'm using some low sodium chicken base to form the basis for the chinese soup in the earlier post. It's there on the spoon, and the teaball and some dried mushrooms

On a related note, i use a big teaball when I'm pressure cooking beans. The  onion normall falls apart, but the big teaball makes it easy to remove from the beans.