Western graters are terrible
I rarely ever used graters before, but in the past month or so I've been on a spring roll rampage. You've gotta have some whiskered cucumbers and carrots, and a mixture of impatience and inadequate knife skills means using a grater. Previously I had a super cheap one from Daiso, but that one broke so I got a nice new one from Oxo. And even though it's technically a lot more featured than the Japanese dollar store version I was using before, it's actually way worse. Today I tried to do a technique I've heard of, shredding tofu, and even though I was using extra-firm it crumbled instead of shredded.
The big difference between the Daiso and Oxo graters is that the Daiso one had maybe 3-4 rows of "teeth" doing the grating and the Oxo one has something like 15-20 of them. That gives you a heck of a lot more friction and you need to put a lot more force to use it. This doesn't just mean that your delicate food will be destroyed, it also means you have to press so hard that you risk your hand slipping and getting shredded. It also means you can't try to get large shreds because it will gum the process up.
In contrast, the fewer holes in the Japanese one would take more passes to shred the same amount of food, but each pass is so much easier because you have the benefit of being able to build up speed and momentum as you shred. It feels like you're making slices instead of trying to force food through a mesh. The holes are also in the center of the grater so each shred is going to be the full length of the thing you're grating.
Why is it that every western grater is built like this? Don't people realize how bad it is?
This post is confusing. Yes, a coarse grater will work better for grating coarsely than a fine grater. What does this have to do with being "Western"?
Oxo itself makes graters of several sizes, and their 15-20 row ones look like relatively fine graters, just above their zesters in fineness. They are simply not designed to do what you're trying to do with them.
I went into the kitchen and actually counted the rows, and it's actually 10 rows. Specifically, it's this grater. It's a fairly well designed thing except for the amount of cutting surfaces. Having more than double the cutting surfaces makes it significantly harder to use.
That looks like the medium size on a typical box grater. Maybe you’d have better luck with a coarser one? I use mine for grating carrots and tofu and it works fine. Things like cabbage or cucumber tend to turn mushy though so I just use a knife for those.
I feel like you're judging every "western grater" based on a relatively crap OXO that seems like the bad-recommendation du jour on social media. I don't know anyone who is serious about cooking that has that OXO one. It also seems like your other one was maybe a micorplane grater that is intended more for grating vegetables, whereas that OXO is more or less a cheese grater.
There's also this to consider: the graters that you're not used to aren't "terrible". You're just not used to them. Your inability to use them properly does not make them objectively bad, and their prevalence in stores doesn't make everyone who uses them stupid. Your preference isn't an objective fact; it's a subjective preference.
I didn’t get the vibe that Akir was saying these graters were objectively, intrinsically terrible? It reads like an exasperated rant (hence the rant and ask.discussion tags). Similarly when people post extensive threads about, say, movies they hate, I don’t assume that they are claiming the movie is objectively bad (and are e.g. calling me out specifically for enjoying them), just that they aren’t fans of them. Akir has listed some reasons that they don’t like a thing, and are sharing it (with just a teensy bit of annoyance in their writing). I got the impression that they’re just sharing their frustration and looking for some social feedback.
(I don’t have a horse in this race, though, as I have a pretty … minimalist kitchen, and don’t own a grater. For the most part I just got used to cutting matchsticks)
I can understand that intent. However, there's this issue where they generalized to all "Western graters". If the post had been "I bought a well reviewed OXO grater and it's terrible" then I think that's a lot more defensible than "Western graters are terrible".
I used an analogy above that I think is useful. If I said "Western movies are terrible" and then reviewed Battlefield Earth, you would likely have some issues with what I said, because what I said would be unreasonable, even though I was frustrated that such a movie was made.
I'm getting a real "how dare you interpret this as precisely what I said" vibe out of this, and I'm going to opt out of this thread after saying that if someone wants social feedback, then this is probably not the way to get it. It's a broad indefensible statement that makes implications that I'm not the only person to see.
Sorry to belabour the point in your notifications, but fair enough :) I guess, for context into the point about cinema, I’m a fan of anime (please insert sneer here) so I’m pretty used to skipping over hot takes that judge an entire category of things based on a single example (eg. watching a random episode of Naruto and concluding that all anime is juvenile filler. Only most of it is, in reality :3). My bar for this sort of thing is probably way higher than normal.
I do think you’ve made your point though! I’m definitely going to watch my phrasing in critiques of my own, going forward, since I hadn’t considered that they could be interpreted this way. So thank you for that, at least :)
That was the idea. Thanks for writing that.
You're drawing a lot of assumptions and being overly aggressive. I never called anyone stupid. That's your own read. I'm also in my 30s. I'm not a child. I've used graters for years. I can tell the difference between a course grater and a microplane. The grater I have purchased is not "crap"; it's very well made and has 4.5 stars on Amazon right now. It's actually better than my memories of the graters I have used before the Daiso one I mentioned. It just suffers the same deficiencies most other graters tend to have.
I'm not being aggressive. While you didn't use the word stupid, the logical conclusion of "everyone is using bad graters instead of the cheaper good ones" is that they are stupid, but I will retract that specific section if you take umbrage to it.
That said, my broader point stands; "Western graters" aren't terrible, you just don't like them. That doesn't make them terrible.
I've used that oxo grater. It isn't a great kitchen tool.
If I said something like "Japanese animation is terrible. I watched Dog Soldier and it wasn't as good as Beauty and The Beast" you would (rightly) call me on that. I'm just doing the same.
You are still misrepresenting my statements. The problem I have is not that people are buying graters built like this, but that the manufacturers keep building them this way.
The fact that I am putting out a personal opinion is self-evident. That’s not some gotcha.
I also didn’t choose that grater based on social media recommendations. It seemed to be the best options based on what was available. You could have just said that you used the grater yourself and it was terrible but instead you chose to write it in an insulting way.
I'd be curious to see images of what you're comparing, every Daiso grater I can find a picture of online looks fairly comparable to most western graters I've ever used.
I would think there's a difference in intent, since western graters are mostly designed for cheese, with variants for things like zesting citrus, whereas most japanese graters are designed primarily for vegetables with variants for things like katsuobushi or whatever.
At home I tend to use a microplane grater for most things, since it's highly superior for hard cheeses (you get fluffy clouds of parmesan rather than hard strips or flakes) and perfect for things like citrus zesting, nutmeg, garlic, turmeric, ginger, etc. Not ideal for soft cheese or watery vegetables but I rarely ever grate those.
Daiso sells about 100 different varieties of graters. I couldn't find the kind I was referring to when I searched online either. I'm referring specifically to "course" graters, where the holes will be roughly 3-5mm in diameter.
The one I had broke because the actual design of it was kind of bad. It had the thinnest metal I've ever seen on a grater, but only a tiny square; the rest was made of plastic, which is what broke because there was only a tiny little ridge on the sides holding it together.
you should pick up a mandolin for julienning stuff like carrots and cucumbers. use the guard if you like your skin where it is.
Second this. The carrots in my spring rolls are julienned while the cucumber are just sliced thin (my wife do like grated carrots, but that's for another dish). It even goes towards your argument; speed and momentum are maximized when you only have one slicing element.
That sounds interesting to me and something I will pursue.
Meanwhile, the secret toy I have that I love and adore is my mouli. Nobody here knows what they are. I don't know how my family found out about them, but my mom had one, and I eventually got one of my own.
Essentially, it's adjacent to the topic - as it's essentially a hand-cranked disc-blade "food processor". As in, you slide a disc into the thing, food sits on top of the disc with a piece that you hold down the food on top of the disc, and you spin the crank to turn the disc, so you get continuous shredding. You can control the difficulty by using smaller chunks of food at a time.
But I'm not in the habit of needing to shred delicate foods. Even cheese holds up well in my experiences.
I think my main reason for commenting is that I find this topic interesting, but also the mouli at least prevents hand slipping. There's no danger there. It's a nice medium space between a large electronic device and a hand grater. :)
As I was writing my scribe I was thinking about bringing up my food processor since it has a shredding disc too. The designers there just put a single row of holes for it to shred things with, just repeated on the other side as well. But there's pretty much no reason I'd ever use it because it would require me to clean something like six different things instead of just one.
I was just about to say that coarse shredded vegetables are something I'd use a food processor for, rather than a handheld grater. The shredder disk might not be ideal for delicate watery cucumbers or tofu, but it's perfect for hard or fibrous carrots, apples, cabbages, turnips, potatoes, and radishes. It doesn't risk the inevitable nicked knuckle if your hand slips.
Yes, it's more of a chore to clean food processor parts, but it's also faster, more effective, and safer for shredding hard vegetables. There will always be engineering tradeoffs depending on the use case, and this is one I'm willing to live with.
I'll admit to bias in favor of power tools and OXO products because arthritis has played merry hell with my knife skills. OXO makes a julienne peeler that's good for smaller batches of the long thin strips used in spring rolls.
Let us not speak of the mandoline, which is a short trip to the first aid kit unless you've got a steel mesh glove.
I disagree with it being faster. It takes more time because it needs to be set up first, and then the vegetables need to be prepped to ~1 inch sticks in order to fit through the tiny feed hole or be put into a more arbitrary shape to get it to fit under the larger pusher doohickey which is extremely annoying because it needs to snap into the thing in order to engage the safety switch for it to turn on, in which case you will need to snap it on and off because there isn’t enough space for all the stuff I’m going to prep. Those six parts that I mentioned need to be cleaned don’t include the knife and cutting board, either.
I bought the Oxo grater because I wanted something easy to handle. I have many memories of graters flying off on me. The one I bought can be put securely against the cutting surface and has yet to slip. The plates can also be slid off the handle to make cleaning easy. It’s a very good grater except for the one issue I complained about.
It sounds like we're talking about different versions of food processor, then. I've got a pretty standard Cuisinart and can shove whole carrots or half potatoes in the feeder until they're fully in the tube and ready for the pusher. Maybe not worth it for an ounce or two of shreds, but it's a huge time saver if you're prepping a pound at a time.
Mine is cuisinart too! But it’s very old and the new ones are much nicer.
Have you tried a rotary grater? They might not meet your needs because it sounds like you're working with small quantities, but they can work great (grate!) for larger amounts.
Separately, a cooking revolution for me was the julienne peeler that can make julienned potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, etc. very easily. We use one for Vietnamese sandwiches, Sichuan julienned potatoes, and with all kinds of other vegetable dishes. Julienning vegetables by hand, with a knife, was never something I had patience for, so finding one of these had a big impact on my cooking.
I picked one up due to Tiktok ads, but went through and did research first. Super happy with it. Carrots and cheese both come through wonderfully. (It's way more accessible for my partner too)
About a year ago I had bought a julienne peeler. Sadly it broke after about three uses and since then I have not been keen on them. I might try again some time in the future, but not now.