Galangal Alpinia galanga
Not a stronger ginger. Sharper, piney, almost medicinal — and substituting ginger for it is why a home-made tom yum never tastes right.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
Slice into coins, leave them in
Cut unpeeled galangal across into thin coins and drop them into the broth. They are too fibrous to eat and are not meant to be — diners push them aside, exactly as with the lemongrass stalk.
Bruise for a paste
For a curry paste it goes into the mortar with the lemongrass and chili and gets pounded to a pulp. Its fibre is what makes hand-pounding hard work and a food processor a poor substitute.
In at the start
It is tough, slow to release and holds up to long simmering. Into the pot with the lemongrass and lime leaf at the beginning — it gives up very little in under twenty minutes.
Beyond the kitchen
MEDIEVAL EUROPE KNEW IT
Galangal was traded into medieval Europe and appears in English, French and German cookery manuscripts from the fourteenth century as galingale. It fell out of European use entirely by the seventeenth century and only returned with Thai restaurants.
HILDEGARD'S SPICE
Hildegard of Bingen wrote about galangal extensively in the twelfth century, and it is one of the spices most associated with her writings — still sold in Germany in a Hildegard context today.
THE FLOWER AND SHOOTS
The young shoots and flower buds are eaten as vegetables in parts of Indonesia and Thailand, and the leaves are used to wrap food. The rhizome is the part that travels, but the plant is used more widely at home.
THREE DIFFERENT PLANTS
Greater galangal, lesser galangal and krachai or fingerroot are three distinct rhizomes used differently across Southeast Asia. Recipes translated into English routinely collapse them into one word.
A longer history
Alpinia galanga is native to Southeast Asia, probably Java and the surrounding islands, and has been used across the region for well over a thousand years. It spread with Indian Ocean trade to India, China and the Arab world, and Arab merchants carried it into medieval Europe.
European use is the surprising part. Galingale appears in English medieval cookery manuscripts, in continental recipe collections and in monastic and medical writing from the twelfth century onward, and was reasonably well known. Then it disappeared — by the seventeenth century Europe had largely forgotten it, and it plays no part in any classical European cuisine.
It remained fundamental across Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam throughout, where it is one leg of the aromatic tripod with lemongrass and makrut lime. Its reappearance in Western shops from the late twentieth century is a return rather than an arrival.