The Best Ginger Graters

If you grate ginger frequently, this is by far the best tool we've found for the job: It's speedy, easy to handle, and superefficient. With ample surface area and razor-sharp etched holes, this tool—made by the same company as our favorite box and rasp-style graters—was the least wasteful in our lineup. It also tied for fastest, making 1 tablespoon of puree in just 15 seconds. Its handle was comfortable to grip, and its wide paddle shape made it especially easy to collect ginger puree and to clean.

If you don't want to buy a separate tool for grating ginger, our favorite box grater is a fast and efficient option. It sports a large, broad grating surface and razor-sharp etched holes on its fine side, allowing it to grate 1 tablespoon of ginger as quickly as our winner; it generated almost as little waste as well. Its box shape makes it easy to keep stable on the counter, but it's less convenient for cleaning and collecting the ginger, requiring users to reach in and scrape it out.

With a medium-size paddle, this stamped grater produced fine puree rapidly, and ginger collection and cleanup were easy. And its handle was long and rubbery enough for all hands to grip comfortably. There was only one issue: It was more wasteful than our top models, leaving half the ginger on the grater.

With a large area of sharp etched holes, our favorite rasp-style grater got the job of grating ginger done—just somewhat more slowly and a touch more wastefully than our top models. Its long, narrow shape was less ideal for handling bigger pieces of ginger and forced us to aim more carefully when grating. It was also harder to clean, since its curved edges trapped pockets of puree underneath.

This dedicated ginger grater made puree pretty rapidly and efficiently. Testers liked that it also came with a slicing blade, though its location next to the grating surface made some testers nervous for their knuckles. Despite having “ginger” in its name, this wasn't the best ginger grater from Microplane; the grating surface itself was small and narrow, clogging more quickly, forcing us to aim more carefully, and limiting the size of the ginger we could grate on it. Because the grating surface was also depressed, it was harder to clean, and its handle, while made of grippy material, was small.

This etched grater produced flat shavings of ginger moderately quickly and efficiently, and testers appreciated its extra slicing blade and ginger peeler. But the tool's grating surface was slightly undersized, forcing us to aim more carefully. More frustrating was the shallow tray fitted under the grating surface, which made it impossible to track progress, filled up too quickly, was a pain to remove and insert, and created extra parts to clean.

The sharp ceramic nubs on this traditional Japanese ginger grater pulverized the ginger into a very fine puree, leaving little waste. But its grating surface was quite small, so it took longer to produce that puree. And the puree didn't always separate easily from the fibrous waste, making the grater a bit harder to harvest from and clean—a little work was required to pry the fibers out from between the nubs.

Although its grating surface was a good size, this ceramic oroshigane took a fairly long time to yield 1 tablespoon of puree and wasn't very efficient. Like the other models that lacked holes, it didn't separate puree from waste all that effectively, and we had to spend a lot of time picking that fibrous waste out from between its nubs. A tiny bump of a handle made it hard to hold and stabilize.

With the largest grating surface in the testing, this grater—fitted with pencil eraser–size, ragged “crown”-shaped holes—was capable of producing a good amount of puree reasonably quickly. But as quickly as it produced that puree, it produced far more waste: Loads of stringy fibers clung to the spikes surrounding the holes, making this model especially vexing to clean. A big (though slippery) handle and a skid-preventing rubber lip at its bottom edge couldn't compensate for these flaws.

Despite its razor-sharp metal teeth, this small traditional metal oroshigane nevertheless took a pretty long time to produce 1 tablespoon of puree and generated a fair amount of waste in the process. Those teeth snagged lots of stringy fiber, which was a big pain to clean, and didn't always separate that fiber from the finer puree and drop it into the collection trough at its base. Finally, its small, flat handle was very uncomfortable to grip.

Dubbed “a sadistic shoehorn” by one tester, this hard-to-hold and impossible-to-stabilize sheet of metal had just two short rows of metal teeth, providing a tiny grating surface for the ginger to rub against. As a result, it took more than 4 mind-numbing minutes to yield 1 tablespoon of puree, and a good amount of ginger fiber stuck tenaciously to those few teeth, making for finicky cleaning.

This stamped grater had a comfortable, cushiony handle and processed the ginger reasonably quickly. And its broad paddle shape made it easy to collect the ginger and to clean the grater. But it was wasteful, leaving behind half the 14-gram chunk of ginger and requiring us to use more ginger to get a full tablespoon of puree.