Living in India, I really miss Slavic food. Of course, here you can find restaurants that offer tourists and local residents Belarusian pancakes or Ukrainian borsch, but still, there are no such products as in Belarus. Therefore, you have to adapt to local food and drinks. Hindus usually add chili, turmeric, and ginger to their food. Recipes for almost every dish involve the use of this fragrant root.
A varied amount of spices include this product. It is easy and simple to find not only a fresh root, but also its pickled, ground and pasty appearance. Surprisingly, ginger lemonade is not so common here. As local
aborigines explained to me
, this is due to the presence of a root in food, so people get all the nutrients from there, and common drinks that perfectly quench thirst are
sugar cane juice and
coconut water.However, in some places you can find a small business or even a household making cucumber cocktails and ginger lemonade. An Indian drink containing a fragrant root is produced according to all traditional rules. First of all, the fragrant root is washed and cleaned. Then each piece is rubbed on a grater. When enough ginger is in the container, it is poured with water. For a while (about a day) this drink is infused. Then the liquid is poured into several separate containers.
Depending on the recipe, various natural additives and spices will be added to ginger lemonade. A drink with honey and lime is considered traditional. Lemonade, in which there is
an Indian spice chat masala, is very popular. It contains the following ingredients: iodized and black salt, mango powder, caraway seeds, mint leaves, black pepper, dry ginger, coriander, pomegranate seeds, chili, nutmeg, cloves, citric acid and asafatide. Therefore, without exaggeration, we can say that ginger lemonade prepared with the addition of this seasoning turns into a cocktail.
However, there are traditional methods for extracting useful properties from this fragrant root. Incidentally, this particular spice is a wonderful medicine rich in vitamins and antioxidants. Even in antiquity, its healing properties and ability to treat poisonous animal bites were noticed. Therefore, a huge amount of medicines and traditional medicine includes ginger.
How to make a healthy drink from this spicy root at home? To do this, we need a small piece of this spice, lemon or lime, honey or sugar (if you, like me, have a sweet tooth) and a little patience.
Initially, we get rid of ginger peel. I warn you that the skin is tight to the fetus, so it is best not to cut it off, but to scrape it off. Next, rub the root on a fine grater or just chop it. Prepared with warm water (its temperature should not be more than 70 degrees Celsius, since boiling water will kill many useful properties of ginger), fill the chopped mass and cover the container with a lid and let it brew for a certain time. I sometimes leave for 8-12 hours. Many people think that 2 hours will be enough. It all depends on what kind of aroma and taste you want to achieve: if you like a more spicy and pungent taste - keep it longer. Next, I filter the drink and add lime and honey to it to taste. Ginger lemonade is ready!