What is fingerroot tea?

Fingerroot tea is a single-use tea bag made from fingerroot, a plant native to tropical rainforests. Simply place the tea bag in hot water and steep for 1-2 minutes to fully enjoy the unique taste and aroma of fingerroot. Fingerroot tea has a relatively pleasant flavor, making it suitable for both as a health tea and a beverage for pleasure. Here is a brief introduction to the raw material, fingerroot.

Fingerroot

Fingerroot is a root vegetable that grows in tropical, humid rainforest regions and is a type of ginger. While its flavor is similar to ginger or turmeric, fingerroot is widely loved by people around the world for its own unique scent and taste. People in the regions where it originates use fingerroot for various purposes, including food, health, gardening, and dyeing. The young leaves, inner stalks, and roots of the fingerroot are often used raw in salads or to remove the fishy odor from fish or meat, just like ginger.

Fingerroot is native to tropical rainforest regions spanning Southern China, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Because its flavor is similar to ginger, it is sometimes called Chinese Ginger. In its native Thailand, it is called Krachai, and in Indonesia, it is known as Temu kunci. Fingerroot cultivation is limited to a narrow region from Vietnam in the east to India in the west. Given that fingerroot has not spread from tropical regions to temperate areas like Korea or Northern China, and remains near its region of origin, it is likely that fingerroot has not existed on Earth for a very long time.

Fingerroot is a very rare vegetable that is not easy to obtain fresh outside of its native lands. Therefore, in Korea, the US, Europe, and other places, it is only available in frozen, pickled, dried, or powdered form. Currently, there are one or two greenhouse farms in Korea, so obtaining it fresh is not entirely impossible, but the amount available is extremely small. Most fingerroot products in Korea are made from raw materials imported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China (Yunnan province), Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, and Sri Lanka.

Because the taste of fingerroot is similar to ginger, it is sometimes used as a substitute for ginger in its home regions, but its appearance is distinctly different from ginger roots. Below is a photo of several clusters of fingerroot roots mixed together.

Looking at the photo above, from left to right, you can see long, plump roots like fingers attached to a short, back-of-the-hand-shaped body cluster; this is one cluster of fingerroot. Due to this appearance, the name "Finger" + "Root" => "Fingerroot" was created in English. In China, it is called 凹脣薑 (Aocunjian), but in Korea, it is called by its English name, fingerroot. We think it would be good to translate fingerroot into Korean as "finger ginger" (son-ga-rak-saeng-gang) so that it is easier for our descendants to understand.

If you slice open a single long, round fingerroot, you can see it has three layers. The cross-section of a fingerroot consists of an outer layer, a middle layer, and a core layer, and because the composition differs, the taste and aroma vary slightly, showing some differences along the length of the root. Below is a photo of a single fingerroot sliced diagonally lengthwise, showing how the tip is slightly bulbous.

People in its native regions usually harvest fingerroot within 1-2 months of planting to eat as a fresh vegetable, harvest within 5 months to use as a seasoning vegetable, and harvest from 6 months up to several years later to use as a health vegetable. Outside of its regions of origin, fingerroot is processed and sold in the form of powders, extracts, essential oils, teas, and pills.

History of Fingerroot

There are no records of fingerroot in ancient Chinese traditional medical texts like the Shennong Ben Cao Jing, or the Indian traditional medical text, Ayurveda. Despite Southern China being an origin point and India being a cultivation country, there are no pre-BC records of fingerroot. The oldest record of fingerroot appears in records from Indonesia, a country where it is cultivated. Fingerroot appears in Jamu, the traditional medicine of Indonesia, which began around 700 AD.

The ways in which fingerroot is used vary slightly between its regions of origin and neighboring countries. Looking at how some countries use it mainly for food, some mainly for health, and others for both, one might think that the time since humans discovered fingerroot in nature and started using it for food and health is not very long, which is why its uses have been limited in each country.

Why Fingerroot is Famous

In plant taxonomy, fingerroot is a perennial plant belonging to the ginger family (Zingiberaceae). There are over 1,300 species of plants in the ginger family used as seasonings, so why did fingerroot, just one of them, become as famous as ginger or turmeric? Why is it that fingerroot, for which no traces can be found in old Korean books, does not grow in the Korean wilderness, and is only grown in one or two places via greenhouse cultivation, is world-famous today?

Europe is not a tropical region, so fingerroot is not cultivated there, but it is widely known throughout European countries to the point where each has its own name for it. This is because the benefits of fingerroot were widely disseminated from the colonies to Europe when Indochina and India were under European colonial rule. The decisive factor that made fingerroot world-famous is likely the well-being trend that began to surge in wealthy nations in the 1980s. It was likely the Panduratin substance contained in fingerroot that caught the eyes of well-being enthusiasts who live by the motto of living a long life with a healthy body and mind.

There is an old saying: "Peach and plum trees do not speak, yet a path forms beneath them." This means that because peach and plum trees have beautiful flowers and delicious fruit, they do not need to call people; people find the trees on their own, creating a path under the trees. It signifies that if something is beneficial, people will naturally gather.

Components of Fingerroot

Below is a general analysis table of fingerroot included in "Edible and Medicinal Plants," published in Switzerland in 2016. The "dry weight basis" indicated in the parentheses below means the values were measured in a state where moisture was removed.

Fingerroot Root Composition Analysis Table (Edible and Medicinal Plants, 2016, Dry weight basis, 38kcal/100g fresh)

Looking at the general components of fingerroot, lipids and ash are quite abundant for a root vegetable. A characteristic of fingerroot is that its nutritional components are well-balanced rather than skewed toward one specific component. Fingerroot contains an abundance of aromatic substances that create its fragrance. Here are a few important, special, and trace components of fingerroot.

The product is supplied by Onyudam (CEO: Yoon Sung-hyun, Jo Su-in) and manufactured by Hapcheon Herbal Processing Agricultural Corporation (CEO: Baek Moon-gi). While running a health herb farm with his parents for over 20 years, CEO Baek established the Hapcheon Herbal Processing Agricultural Corporation in 1996, built a processing plant the following year, received the $500,000 Export Tower award for the first time in 2003, and served as the 17th-18th Chairman of the Korea Herbal Medicine Association.

Located in Hapcheon-eup, Hapcheon-gun, where the corporation is based, Hapcheon Herbal Processing Agricultural Corporation cultivates about 60 types of medicinal plants, including chrysanthemum, hydrangea, mulberry, persimmon, peony, achyranthes, safflower, motherwort, schisandra, matrimony vine, cornus fruit, milk vetch, green tea, tara vine, and bellflower, to use as raw materials for health teas. The company sells its products through domestic and international channels and also supplies products to other companies via OEM manufacturing.

Hapcheon Herbal Processing Agricultural Corporation received the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Award in 2002, registered the trademark 'Sangrime' in 2007, obtained the ISO 22000 international food safety standard certification in 2015, and was registered as a venture company in the same year. In 2017, it patented its bellflower tea manufacturing method; in 2018, it obtained HACCP (Food Safety Management System) certification from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (No. 2018-2-9156); and in 2019, it received Organic Certification for its chrysanthemum crops (No. 17100199), establishing itself as a small yet strong company. A brief introduction to Hapcheon Herbal Processing Agricultural Corporation is provided below.

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