Simmer Stock - Kitchen props: Grate Zest!

Grate Zest!

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Freshly grated citrus peel, whether from lemons, limes or oranges, adds, um, well, zest to almost any dish. The best zest contains only the very outer part of the fruit's skin and none of the bitter white pith. To grate great zest, you need one of these Microplane things. After all, how can you not love a tool that you can use to zest your lemon, grate your parmesan and plane the edge of that door that keeps sticking?

I had always been happy using my 75¢ dollar store box grater for zesting my citrus and grating my cheese and nutmeg. More to the point, I'm incredibly leery of spending over $10 on any kitchen gadget and highly cynical about the latest gadget being hyped by the food media. But, I kept reading about these Microplane things (with its almost mythic origins) and seeing them used and commented about on TV cooking shows again and again. After years of listening to the kitchen pundits and pros pontificate on the wonders of this little tool, I finally gave in a bought one about a year ago.

Those foodie bastards. They were right all along.

In short, the Microplane makes fast work out of grating anything with very little mess or waste. I actually timed it, and it takes on average 1/2 the time to zest a lemon or grate a cup of parmesan with a Microplane than on a perforated box grater. Better still, all of whatever you're grating into your dish actually goes into your dish (as opposed to a third of it wedged between the perforations on a box grater). For perfect citrus zest, fluffy mounds of Parmesan and doors that open without sticking, you need to get yourself one of these.

Posted on Apr 24, 2002 @ 04:22 PM