Young Ginger

We happened upon some young ginger in our local Chinese supermarket; my beautiful Bride had been looking for some. Basically, young ginger is ginger that has been picked early. Its growing season is from Spring to Summer (it's very late summer for us here, I can't explain the availability).Young ginger has all the flavour that you enjoy in older ginger, but has less of the bitterness or astringency that older ginger gets (ok, I like this strong flavour in many dishes). Older ginger too tends to get a little "woody" and is hard to cut; young ginger can be easily cut and doesn't have any of the hard knobby bits. There is also very little of the skin that you get with older ginger, though you still want to peel it. You can use young ginger in any recipe that you normally use ginger in now, you'll just get a smoother ginger flavour. One use of it that I found out recently, is pickling it; the pink ginger that you see with sushi, is pickled young ginger. I like young ginger, and would say that I prefer it to the older ginger.