Illustrative photo: I’m talking about the pointy things showing on the right hand side of this cheese grater.
I’ve occasionally tried to make use of that surface for
• shredding ginger or horseradish or radishes;
• grating hard cheese such as parmesan
• [del]scratching the skin of my subbie in BDSM play[/del] umm sorry Opal I haven’t really tried it for a third thing…
Whenever I’ve tried to make use of it, the food in question gets embedded in the little star-holes and then covers up the pointy star bits with clumps of fibrous or gummy food-matter; I do not get a nice pile of shredded vegetables or finely grated cheese; and then I have to clean the damn thing and then use some other implement for the intended purpose.
They must have had something in mind, though; every damn grater (at least those of the boxy four-sided or six-sided variety) has at least one such surface and often TWO of them.
Do yourself a favor and get a fine Microplane for nutmeg, hard cheeses and citrus zesting and don’t fuck around with that part of the box grater- it’s not worth the trouble.
I’ll tell you what that’s good at shredding, which everyone here well knows:
It’s good at shredding your Scotch-Brite pad or whatever similar implement you try to use to clean out the gummed up cheese that you tried to shred.
Here’s a pro-tip: Get those new edible vitamin-enriched Scotch-Brite Pads that you find in health-food stores, and shred that onto your casserole. Works like a champ.
I use mine (I call it the “rasp side” of the grater) for turning hard foods into powder. In practice, this means Parmesan cheese and nutmeg and little else. Anything with significant moisture (lemon zest in particular) will, as you say, gum up the works. Cinnamon sticks could in principle be ground this way, but in my experience the sticks are a little too fragile and break apart while you’re grating them.
I also find that it works better if I rub the object around with a circular motion on the rasp, rather than using the usual up-and-down motion I would use on the other sides.
I’m thirding how great Microplanes are. If you use any kind of citrus zest, you need a Microplane zester.
A brief derail: I’ve also found that if your citrus is kind of shiny (anything that isn’t organic?), it’s because of vegetable wax which will stick to the outside of any zest you use. Before zesting, I boil a half sauce pot of water, and dunk the citrus in for 5 seconds, pull it out and wipe it with a paper towel as quickly as you can. I suspect that the boiling water softens the wax enough to where it can be mostly wiped off.
I only use that for nutmeg. Grate the nutmeg, then when you have about half as much as you need, give the grater a tap with the rest of the nut and you’ll get the rest (for small values of nutmeg).
Ain’t that the truth. I think that side is mostly there to make the thing harder to clean. Personally I never use any side but the one with the big round holes, but the little starry things still collect bits of Scotch-Brite.
And why do the call it a cheese grater, when, whichever way you look at it, it makes the cheese smaller?
