Fresh ginger is one of those irreplaceable ingredients. There's no dried, powdered, jarred, or tubed alternative that can come close. But it's not the most convenient stuff in the pantry.

If you keep a whole hand of it in the fridge, you'll get a couple of weeks out of it.  But each time you pull it out, you'll have to trim away the dried out bits and peel what you need. This is hassle. I hate hassle. I concoct elaborate schemes in order to avoid or frontload hassle.

And so it is with ginger. I buy my ginger two large hands at a time, and prep it all at once so that it's ready to go when I need it. And here's how I do it.

First, peel the ginger. You'll want a small paring knife for this. If you're lazy and/or don't care so much about waste, you can cut off the smallest nubs and square off the rest. Otherwise, just follow the contours and make sure you get all the peel off.

Once it's peeled, just cut it into chunks. I aim for roughly one inch cubes, with smaller chunks as dictated by the shape of the ginger. Then I put the chunks into a small plastic container, and pop the container in the freezer.

This sounds simple, but it has tons of benefits. It's incredibly convenient, most importantly. I can grab one or two chunks whenever I need them. And I've found that ginger frozen this way is at least 90% as good as fresh.

I also found a nice side effect of freezing ginger. I use a Microplane to grate my ginger. Supermarket ginger is fairly fibrous stuff, and is tough to clean out of the grater. Freezing ginger breaks down these fibers somewhat, which makes grating it easier... as long as you leave it frozen.

If you thaw the ginger out completely, it'll be soft and difficult to grate. So instead, take frozen ginger chunks, rinse them briefly to remove any frost, and then grate right away.Works like a charm.