Chinese Cooking
Mapo Dofu - Step 3

When we pick out fresh ginger we try to select pieces that make it easy to peel. For our dinner for 6 people we selected a piece of ginger about 4 inches long. First cut off the ends and then peel the ginger removing the brown skin. We find that a small sharp knife does the job best. No good Chinese cook would ever use any ginger but fresh ginger. At one location where we lived and worked in China, we saw a pile of ginger about 6 feet in diameter and 4 feet high being worked on. That school fed perhaps 4,000 students for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That took a lot of ginger.