Cheese is awesome, especially finely grated cheese melted over omelettes or bolognaise.  I believe any meal can be improved with cheese and considering cheese has been around since 2000BC, I assume I’m not alone in that theory. It was my love of cheese which made me keen to test the One Touch Power Grater only Alex grabbed it first. All was not lost however as the instructions are so teeny tiny that she couldn’t actually read them! So it was that the Power Grater became mine.

The Power Grater is a battery operated cheese grater with two blades, coarse and fine. Having quite a few parts this isn’t a gadget you want to be setting up in a hurry. Once together however it’s quite a fabulous little gadget. The Power Grater will save you time and effort if you’re alone in the kitchen and too busy cooking your masterpiece to grate cheese. It’s also a great job for your resident kitchen loafer. Rather than get in your way, they can instead make themselves useful by loading up the cheese holder and pressing [on] button.
The way the Power Grater works is quite clever. It’s Spring-loaded so that as the blade turns, the pressure stays on the cheese to ensure even grating. To enable the Power Grater to be low maintenance, it also comes with a cheese bucket and an attachment to allow the Power Grater to be fitted on top of the bucket. When the grating is done, the bucket has a lid so the cheese can be stored away until needed. All the smaller parts of the Power Grater are easily removed and are dishwasher safe.

The Power Grater runs on 4 AA batteries which can be awkward to fit the first time. I checked the instructions twice and still only got them in through trial and error. It really needs to be used with more powerful batteries like Energizer as the cheap and nasties cause the grater to run quite slowly. Another important thing to know about the Power Grater is that it really needs both hands to set it up. This is not something to give you your elderly Gran with arthritis unless you’re planning on visiting her regularly.

You may be wondering why grate cheese at all? Why not just buy pre-grated bags of cheese? I wondered that too until one of our reviewers (who is a marvellous Italian cook) pointed out that shop-bought cheese is too dry to be a wonderful addition to a meal. Fresh cheese wins out every time in her opinion, and now that I’ve compared the two, my opinion also.

I really like the Power Grater but unfortunately it needs to lose points for both the tiny instructions and the difficulties loading the batteries.

RRP £20 and available online at Amazon, and many other kitchenware retailers.

www.culinare.com