Box grater

The four sides

Coarse holes

Cheese for melting, carrot for a cake, courgette, potato for rösti. The everyday side.

Medium or fine holes

Hard cheese, chocolate, nutmeg at a push, and vegetables you want to disappear.

The slicing blade

A single slot with a blade. Makes even slices of cucumber, courgette, potato and onion. Effectively a mandoline you already own, and equally capable of taking a fingertip off.

The spiky, star-shaped face

Almost universally misunderstood. It is for shredding soft things into a paste — ginger, garlic, hard cheese into fluff — and for citrus zest at a pinch. Awkward to clean and genuinely useful.

A microplane, separately

Not a grater side but the tool that has largely replaced two of them. Best for zest, hard cheese, garlic, ginger and nutmeg.

Tricks worth knowing

• Grate butter for pastry and scones. Frozen butter on the coarse side gives you evenly distributed cold pieces without any rubbing in — the single best use of a grater in baking.
• Grate a tomato on the coarse side, cut face down, and the flesh comes through while the skin stays in your hand. This is how much of Spanish and Middle Eastern cooking makes a fresh tomato base.
• Grate onion for burgers, meatballs and marinades, where you want the juice and no texture.
• Grate frozen ginger, which shreds cleanly instead of stringing.
• Grate hard cheese from the fridge, cold. Room-temperature cheese clogs the holes.
• Spray the grater lightly with oil before grating anything sticky — cheese especially — and it comes off far more easily.
• Grate over a plate or into a bowl, not onto a board, and stand the grater in a bowl for the fine side, which throws everything sideways.

Using it safely

• The last third of anything is where the injuries happen. Stop before you reach your knuckles.
• Keep the leftover ends for stock, soup or the compost. A knuckle is worth more than the end of a carrot.
• A cut-resistant glove costs very little and is worth having if you grate a lot.
• The slicing blade is the most dangerous part of the tool by some distance. Treat it like a mandoline and use a guard.
• Grate away from you, with the grater braced on a damp cloth so it cannot slide.

Why grating changes an ingredient

Grating is not just cutting small. It ruptures a very large number of cells for the volume of food, which releases whatever was inside them — juice, enzymes, aromatic compounds — all at once and all over the surface.

That is why grated garlic and ginger are dramatically stronger than sliced, why grated onion gives juice rather than pieces, and why grated courgette immediately weeps water that has to be squeezed out before it goes into a fritter. The same effect is why grated tomato makes a sauce base in seconds and grated cheese melts far faster than sliced.

Choosing a grater side is therefore an intensity decision as much as a texture one, in exactly the way choosing how to cut garlic is.

Common questions