I love ginger. I use it ALL the time. For years I, who puts it in so many things, could never get to the end of the entire root that I would buy at the grocery store. I imagine that most people, who only use it sporadically, throw a lot more away than I ever did. I hate food waste but I bet we have all discovered shriveled ginger end pieces lurking in our hydrators at some point or the other.
As much as I love ginger, I hate fussy and a lot of the solutions proposed via the Internet seemed labor intensive. I read about pureeing ginger and freezing it flat in teaspoon portions on a baking sheet before storing the ginger bits in a tupperware for future use. There was also the option of grating the ginger into ice-cube trays, covering it with water and using one of the cubes any time a recipe called for ginger. A friend of mine juices hers and stores the juice, frozen flat in a ziplock bag. She knocks pieces off with a meat tenderizer when she needs some for a recipe. The only response to any of these options felt like "meh, too fiddly".
Since it seemed as though ginger had no problem with being frozen, my personal solution was to go the simplest route possible. Whenever I buy ginger, I wash and dry it well and throw the entire piece, whole, in the freezer. Any time I need some I remove it and microplane some, peel and all, directly into whatever I'm cooking. I then put the ginger right back in the freezer. This is incredibly pain-free a method and the ginger lasts forever or until you've used the entire root.
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