Why would anybody need my grated cheese tips?

Cooking for one, I often use cheese – and would often just grate cheese “on demand” as it seemed easier – but not actually grated cheese, I’d just use a knife to scrape pieces off due to the small quantity I needed.

I’d used cheese graters in the past with a turning handle, but couldn’t see the point of using one of those graters when I could simply cut cheese up small when I needed some – I saw it as a washing up overhead…. I’d be creating washing up for a little bit of grated cheese.  When cooking small portions it simply didn’t compute as a good idea to use a grater like this…

I’d tried buying bags of grated cheese at the supermarket – although they’ve got a shockingly short shelf life before they go green, so I’ll not buy those again!

However, cutting off slivers of cheese on demand never gave me that great texture and feeling that you get from a pile of grated cheese though.  It did the job, just not very well.

So I’ve now developed my “Grated Cheese System”, so to speak!

1. I’ll typically buy cheese in a resealable pack of about 350 grams.  What I do now is I remove the whole block from the bag and cut it into four pieces – the size of the pieces is dictated by the width of what my cheese grater can manage, so I am cutting the cheese block into pieces that will automatically fit into my cheese grater.
2. I keep back one piece to be grated now and put the remaining cheese fingers back into the resealable pack and into the fridge.
3. I then grate one stick of cheese into a plastic/lidded takeaway box.  The takeaway box is then in the fridge and can be grabbed and used quickly – and I get great grated cheese every time.
4. When the grated cheese runs out I just open the resealable packet and grate the next finger of cheese!  The cheese blocks in the fridge are always the perfect size to just fit into the grater – so it’s a lot easier to “bother”.

I find this works well for me as I’m only washing up the grater once a week or so, yet have grated cheddar available in the fridge all the time.

Freeze Cheese

Did you know you can freeze cheese, grated or whole? Freeze Cheese – although I rarely need to do this.

This means you could even grate up a whole pack in one go – then portion it up!

If you’re just shaving bits of cheese off a block as you don’t need much, maybe it’s time for you to rethink that as this works for me and it might be just what makes your life easier!