Many meals and recipes will require the shredding or fine chopping of vegetables. While our kitchens are equipped with a hefty amount of knives, the best way and most time-efficient manner of grating vegetables is with a dedicated vegetable grater. The use of a vegetable grater seems pretty straightforward but there are a whole host of different mistakes that people tend to make when using this kitchen tool. As cooks and mothers trying our best to optimize the flavour and nutritional value of our cooking, its ideal that we take the time to truly understand how to use our vegetable graters in order to bring out the best in our food.
Types of a Vegetable Grater
There are 2 standard types of vegetable graters, although there are electronic ones that have recently been released into the market. The manual ones look a lot like cheese graters and require the force and movement of a user in order to grate vegetables. The first type is the box grater and the other is the plane grater. If you want more function out of your vegetable grater, then you should purchase a box grater. Oftentimes, these models have more than just a grating surface and provide users both a small and large shredding surface to manage the thickness of the grated vegetables and a slicing surface that acts as a knife. If you want a vegetable grater thats a little more to the point and offers easier storage, the plane vegetable grater should be right up your alley.
There are other types of vegetable graters however, particularly noteworthy is the model that offers a crank. This non-electronic vegetable grater allows users to grate vegetables by simply dropping their veggies into the small device and turning a crank until all the ingredients are grated. This usually comes with a few other pieces allowing users to change the grating mechanisms to adjust the coarseness or fineness of their grated vegetables.
How to Choose a Vegetable Grater
There are numerous considerations you should think about when choosing a vegetable grater, but if you want to speed the process, you should focus on three main points: brand, price, and make or material. A better brand will ensure that you have a high quality product in your hands and will make it much more of an investment. Many lesser known manufacturers do not have the same skill and precision when it comes to creating their products, thus they tend to easily break. The second consideration is price the last thing you would want to do is to buy a vegetable grater thats beyond a reasonable cost.
This is particularly true if youre buying a plane cutter. There are numerous cutters that sell for under $10 USD, so make sure you shop around before you make a purchase. Finally, the make and material will give you an idea as to how safe it would be to use your vegetable grater. If it has a tendency to break into small undetectable pieces, or if its made of materials that are not safe for contact with food ingredients, you should probably move on to the next option.
