Home › Home & Kitchen › Kitchen & Dining › Kitchen Utensils & Gadgets › Graters & Zesters How to Grate Ginger Published: July 9, 2026 · Updated: July 9, 2026
Scrape the thin skin off with the edge of a spoon, then grate the ginger on a fine grater, microplane or ceramic ginger grater, working across the fibres so you get a soft pulp instead of stringy threads. Grate over a bowl to catch the flavourful juice, and freezing the knob first makes it firmer and easier to grate.
Recommended Spoon off the skin, grate fine across the fibres, and keep the juice — Ginger has a thin skin and tough lengthwise fibres, and grating it well is about dealing with both. There's no need to peel it with a knife and waste the flesh underneath — just scrape the skin off with the edge of a teaspoon, which slips easily around the knobbly shape. Use a fine grater: a microplane, a fine box-grater side, or a traditional ceramic ginger grater (oroshigane) with lots of little teeth, all of which reduce ginger to a fine, juicy pulp rather than the big shreds a coarse grater gives. Grate across the grain, not along it, so the fibres are cut short instead of pulling out as stringy strands; on a ceramic grater, small circular motions work well and the fibres collect on the surface for you to discard. Hold it over a bowl or plate, because much of ginger's flavour is in the juice you'll want to keep. A useful trick: freeze the ginger and grate it straight from frozen — it's firmer, grates cleanly with less stringiness, and stores for months, so you can keep a knob in the freezer just for grating.
