Healthy Eating

Grating and Storing Cheddar Cheese

Purchasing pre-shredded packages of cheese is expense, contains added chemicals and is not very tasty. 

But, I do it.

Because it’s convenient.

Please.  It’s not that hard to shred some cheese.

And then I had the great (no pun intended) idea to get the gargantuan block of cheddar from Costco and grate up the whole thing and store it.

And actually grating that much cheese is sort of a chore, but in the long run it’s worth it.

Here’s how I grated and stored my cheese.

Use a Sharp Grate

I am so lucky to have the Pampered Chef grate.  It’s really sharp and it comes with a doohickey that allows you hold and press down small amounts of food.

That means that when you get down to the end of the cheese, you don’t add any of your finger skin to the pile of cheese.  Score!

I think if you have a grating blade on a food processor that is even better, but I don’t, so I did it the old fashioned way.

Divide the Cheese

I cut the huge block (2.5 pounds!) into quarters and grated the cheese in batches.  After each batch was grated I placed it into a large bowl.

Prevent Clumping

Now, this is the reason prepackaged shredded cheese contains added chemicals.  Because that grated cheese won’t stay separated.

Cornstarch to the rescue!

After each batch of cheese was shredded, I added about 1 œ teaspoons of cornstarch and tossed it well.

Store

If you have super-duper airtight food storage containers (such as the Rubbermaid I love) it’s best to store your cheese in that. 

But when you have a household of two people and have enough cheese for the entire town, it’s going to need to go in the freezer.

And I don’t have enough room or containers to store cheese that way.

Freezer Ziplocs for the win.

Each batch now goes into its own baggie, gets dated and stacked into the freezer.  The baggies stack nicely and hardly take up any room at all.

Wrap Up

It took me about 30 minutes to grate, process and store the entire brick of cheese.  Oh, and clean up the mess.  You know I made a mess.

I hope this motivates you to do your own grating and storing of cheese.  Once I got off my keester, I could admit this is tastier and healthier.  And cheaper!

Follow Up

If you caught my post on refreshing a wood finish, I wanted to share a couple of good comments I got. Jann let me know that she uses a food-friendly oil, and not Old English, on a serving board they have. Very good point!

Connie agreed that the dark Old English is scary, so they use multiple coats of the light wood finish and it works great.

Weekend

Are you doing anything fun or interesting this weekend?  I mostly likely will be eating tacos or something with shredded cheese on it.  Ha!

Seriously I am chomping at the bit to switch out spring dĂ©cor for summer dĂ©cor.  I feel like tulip season has passed and I need switch things up.

Ideas about that?  Pottery Barn keeps beckoning me and I’m finding it hard to resist.

God bless you and yours and catch you next week!