The Microplane is a Terrible Cheese Grater

but it's great at other things.

Pasta, it’s why I breathe. When I’m in Italy, (and I haven’t been in over five years) the pastas sing to me like an angelic choir. Once a chef in Perugia told me - when the pasta is on the table, you’re not permitted to add any salt; if flavor is lacking, the saltiness you seek should be from the addition of grated cheese. To acquire that perfectly integrated level of saltiness in a delicious dish of pasta, care must be taken during the cooking process. Salt the water that cooks the pasta so that the noodles themselves are seasoned throughout, not after the fact in a topical manner.

Italy has many rules when it comes to food. I break them as most do, but I love knowing them all as well. Being an informed rule breaker has its perks - don’t plead ignorance!…but the above rule about salting the water and not the finished pasta is one that truly builds a good habit in cooking pasta.

If a pasta dish is under-seasoned by the time you’ve combined the pasta and the sauce, we should talk about the percentage of salt you’re adding to the water you boil it in. A good rule of thumb is to use the metric system; for every 100 grams of pasta, you should boil 1,000 grams (milliliters) of water and dissolve 10 grams of salt. 10/100/1000 - that’s 10x the water by weight of the pasta and 1% salinity. A box of pasta is about 450grams, that means 4.5 Liters of water and 45 grams of salt - In old money, that’s about 40 grams of salt in just over a gallon of water for 1 (1LB) box of pasta. I can’t give you volumetric measurements of salt, because each brand is too varied in that unit of measure. Kosher salt is great for this because it’s relatively cheap, and considering so much salt will go down the sink drain, there is waste involved, so affordability is key. Gram scales are the future of cooking. I’m working on a post about this as well, so be sure to subscribe. Also, if you stick with one brand of kosher salt, cup it in your hand a weight it - you’ll develop a muscle memory for the correct weight pretty quickly, but changing brands will throw it all off!

Once the pasta is cooked, the sauce should be mildly salty, the pasta is the main event, and there should be no finishing salt. The only way to amp up the flavor, according to this rule, is with cheese (or for oil based sauces with toasted sometimes seasoned breadcrumbs). Grating cheese with a Microplane will almost never satisfy the amount of cheese you need. Why? Because it’s too fine, too precious, too delicate at lifting the airiest sliver of hard aged cheese; the light shavings that fall to the plate are cute, but rather ineffective. To clarify, think about trying to pack a snowball with light airy snow; it’s definitely not ideal. The amount of snow that you need to pack for a snowball (i.e. cheese that you need to grate) is less rewarding, harder and more exhausting to achieve. The work/reward ratio do not equate; the microplane will not deliver the hardiness of the grate that enriches and finishes the dish - and that’s my problem with the microplane. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that a baseball sized mound of microplaned cheese equates to less than a quarter or the weight had it been grated with a box.

I have been enjoying my box grater. The annoying side with the pore-sized holes works very well, but lately, I’ve really been enjoying the largest side of the grater - it’s not difficult to grate, the pieces are hearty enough that you get those explosions of cheese umami and a little bite of texture - and, when it looks like a lot, it is. A large distinction from what the microplane can produce.

So what is a microplane good for?

citrus zest

grating various nuts as a cheese replacement, like cashews - although it’s hard to get a lot of quantity, for a lot of cashew nuts (or walnuts or any nut) a rotary grater is best, because you can pack them in there.

I’m not a fan of a lot of single use tools in the kitchen - but I do have three graters, a microplane, rotary and box. Each is pretty fantastic at doing specific things. That’s just about the only kind of specificity I can get behind. Lastly, if you have no grater at all, a vegetable peeler is your best bet for cheese - shavings of parm and pecorino are highly underrated!

ps, I’m convinced restaurants use a microplane table side, because to the untrained eye, it looks like they’re giving you so much cheese, but in actuality, it’s mostly air, which saves them food-cost dollars.