Not Cinnamon — Apples Taste 100% More Delicious When Paired With This Spice

Listen, nobody's denying that apples and cinnamon are a match made in culinary heaven. That perfect pairing is why things like apple pie, apple crisp, apple turnovers and, heck, even Apple Jacks exist. But cinnamon, for all of its ubiquity, is not the only spice that enhances apples to such an enduring degree. Ginger is also excellent with apples in all of their forms.

The soothing fragrance of a jar of ground ginger will typically hit you first, smooth and fresh with notes of citrus and a bit of a peppery bite. Taste it and those elements continue with a warming quality that stops short of approaching the heat of any pepper that really makes a mark on the Scoville scale. Both cinnamon and ginger are considered warming spices, and the latter is just as terrific with all of those Granny Smith, Red Delicious, and Honeycrisp apples as the more standard cinnamon. Individual palates will come to their own conclusions, but ginger also tends to land peppy and bright, whereas cinnamon skews more woodsy and deep. So the former is lovely in any apple configurations that you want to make even more bright and lilting with ginger's signature flair. And you can easily up the ginger content in all of your own apple preparations, any time. Mass-market cereal, however, you might just have to wait for.

Ginger skeptics can start slow. A lot of apple pie recipes will actually already call for both ground cinnamon and ground ginger, albeit in a four to one ratio, advantage: cinnamon. Swap those proportions and consider using something like two teaspoons of ginger to a half teaspoon of cinnamon instead. The difference should be fairly subtle in something as large as a pie, and you may notice more of a difference in a more petite treat like the aforementioned turnover. A throwback baked apple preparation is also an excellent canvas for testing your ginger appreciation.

A lot of baked apple instructions call for just a handful of ingredients: the fruit itself, butter, brown sugar, maybe a handful of nuts and, of course, a classic warming spice. That is going to be listed as cinnamon the overwhelming majority of the time. So why not swap that spice with ginger instead? Because a single apple and the rest of the components won't cost terribly much, and it can take as little as half an hour to bake an apple to tender deliciousness, the investment in your ginger adventure is relatively low. If you're happy with the swap, you're likely to find yourself taking even bigger ginger swings next time.