Learn How to Make Traditional Ginger Sauce (2024)

Ginger is one of the staples of Chinese cooking and the most common Chinese seasoning. Along with garlic, it is added to many stir-fried dishes, soups, and sauces. There are different kinds of ginger sauces in Chinese cuisine. This easy and quick dipping sauce is one of the most popular and commonly used ginger sauces. It is used for dipping seafood, especially crabmeat.

The sauce is made with peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger, light soy sauce, and rice vinegar. All ingredients are available at well-assorted supermarkets or Asian grocery stores.

Ginger is a root and oddly shaped with lots of nooks and crannies. This makes peeling challenging, but there is a great trick for this: Peel the root ginger with a spoon. As ginger dries out fast, it is best to peel and chop it just before using.

The recipe calls for light soy sauce as opposed to dark soy sauce. Light soy sauce is your standard thin, light reddish brown and opaque soy sauce. It is not the same as low-salt or reduced-salt soy sauce, which is sometimes labeled as “lite soy sauce.”

Rice vinegar is the same as rice wine vinegar, the two terms are used interchangeably. The term rice wine vinegar is a bit confusing because it is not the same as rice wine.

Melting the brown sugar gives the sauce a deep, slightly caramelized flavor. This is done over high heat, and once the sugar has fully melted, make sure to remove the saucepan from the heat instantly because the sugar turns dark and burns very fast.

When you add the liquids—soy sauce and rice vinegar mixture—to the melted sugar, the sugar will harden at first, which is fine and nothing to worry about. Once you have returned everything to a boil, the sugar will melt again.

You can use this ginger sauce in many ways. It makes a nice dipping sauce for appetizers containing shrimp, such as shrimp balls or almond prawn balls. Or serve it with pot stickers, gyoza, or Chinese dumplings such as xiaolongbao, the Shanghai-style steamed dumplings.

You can also use the ginger sauce to brush on shrimp before grilling or to marinate seafood for a weeknight or family dinner. The amounts are easily doubled or tripled to make enough marinade to cover the seafood.

You can prepare the sauce in advance, which makes it perfect for serving at parties or cookouts.