The Kitchen Tool There's Simply No Excuse Not To Have

Back in 1990, Grace Manufacturing developed a woodworking finishing tool called a Microplane. The culinary world took notice, and just five years later, the company realized a substantial portion of purchases were for kitchens in need of zesting lemons and cheeses. It's one of Ina Garten's favorite kitchen tools, and there's no reason for it to be missing from your kitchen. For starters, it's a superior and less-messy tool for mincing garlic than that bulky garlic press. In professional and home bars, it's a must for garnishing drinks with orange zest or even fresh-grated nutmeg for those autumn cocktails.

While you can get rasp graters with different-sized grating holes, this article is focused on the original Microplane that's been adopted as a name much like Q-tip. With its fine grating holes, it's also ideal for grating hard cheeses like Parmesan over a bowl of pasta. The resulting shreds of cheese are so fine they practically disappear as they melt, leaving behind only the flavor to delight the nose and taste buds. It's perhaps this that sets the Microplane apart from other graters; the result is meant to add fragrance to a meal, like in the case of mincing garlic before tossing it into a hot pan, or to finish a meal with an additional touch of flavor. You're not meant to chew what you put through a Microplane.

Well, no, not quite. Once you use a Microplane, you might think that a bulky box grater no longer serves a purpose. A Microplane is easy to clean since you can reach both sides of the grater quickly with any scrubber. A box grater is always a bit more difficult because you have to get inside to actually get all the remnants and streaks of whatever you ran through it. A Microplane takes up far less space in your kitchen, fitting inside one of your utensil drawers. In my kitchen, the box grater jumps around and gets put away wherever it happens to fit in the cupboards.

While a rasp grater has its benefits, it's not the only grater you'll ever need. As previously mentioned, its primary use in the kitchen is zesting lemons and oranges or fine-grating hard cheeses, chocolate, and even vegetables like carrots for a cake. But that's not always what you want from a grater. Say you're making pizza, quesadillas, or cheese pupusas. You want to be able to see the cheese stretch far when you pull these apart. A box grater gives you the ability to choose bigger holes for more substantial strips of cheese you can still see and bite into. Another example is vegetables like celery or carrots that you wish to serve as strips to top a salad. A Microplane isn't going to replace your box grater, but with everything it can do well, there's no excuse to not have one in your kitchen.