How To Easily Prep Vegetables For Any Stir-Fried Recipe

There are many kitchen gadgets that help you prepare and cook your dishes. Preparing ingredients for stir-fries has to be one of the more effort-intensive recipes you may make.Â
Stir fry recipes are notorious for having a long list of ingredients. It can contain as few as four ingredients to as many as 10 ingredients in just one dish! This means you have to prepare and chop up each individual ingredient you are going to add to the pot.Â
We know a simple and under-used kitchen gadget that can quickly make this effort-heavy task much faster and easier: the grater. Â
A typical grater has at least four sides or four cutting surfaces:
- • large or coarse grater
- • small or fine grater
- • slicer
- • rasp
The one we highly suggest for stir-fries is the large or coarse grater. That's because this grating side can basically take over your job of slicing vegetables into thin strips. Do this properly and you can basically cut and slice carrots for example into moderately even strips in seconds instead of minutes.
This is perfect for stir fries!Â

The grater can turn many vegetables into the prepared ingredients you need for your stir fry. What's wonderful is that since the grater has more than one side or cutting surfaces, you can do more than just transform vegetables into strips using the grater sides. You can also use the slicer to slice a potato into planks if you don't want to grate it too finely. Pass it through the slicer again to make sticks! You can use the slicer to slice garlic, onions, and even green beans and cabbage instead of reaching for the knife and chopping block.Â
Here are just a few of the different vegetables you can use your grater so you can save time and effort in the kitchen by using either the grater sides or the slicer:
- • carrots
- • zucchini
- • cabbage
- • eggplant
- • green beans
- • bell peppers
- • onions
- • garlic
- • gingerÂ
- • kamote or sweet potatoes
- • fresh mushrooms
- • citrus to remove the zest
Got spices you want to add? Use the rasp side to finely grind hard spices such as cinnamon or nutmeg into a powder. You can use this side, too, to make hard cheese super fine!Â
The key is really knowing which side to use for the vegetable that you are preparing. The bad news is that the grater doesn't work for all vegetables but it can help in keeping those pieces more uniformly sliced than if you used a knife. This is especially useful if you're not confident with your knife skills. Â
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