Test Kitchen Tuesday

Note: Since I published this post, Ninja has come out with a Pulse that comes with a grating attachment. I have not tried it, but it appears very similar to a food processor grating attachment so it will likely do the trick for you if you want a Pulse that also grates cheese!

Note #2: Also since I published this post, Ninja has come out with a new Kitchen System called the Ninja Mega Kitchen System 1500, which also comes with a grating attachment like a food processor. It has a bunch of other neat accessories as well, including single serve blending.

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A few folks have asked recently if it is possible to grate cheese in a Ninja Blender or Ninja Pulse, so I decided to do a little experiment.

I picked up a Ninja Pulse last week on sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond and used a 20% off coupon on top of that, so I ended up getting it for only $70. That is a huge bargain! I’m in the process of putting it through the paces right now so I can write up a full review as well as a comparison against the Ninja Professional Blender as well as the similar Cuisinart personal blending system.

Meantime, I decided to tackle the cheese grating issue right away. I’ll tell you that my initial inclination before starting this project is that the Ninja would grind up the cheese, making it meltable, but not shred it like true grated cheese. And, you’ll see below that is pretty much what happened.

For this project, I did a side-by-side test of the Ninja Pulse with both a “hard” cheese (cheddar) and a “soft” cheese (mozzarella) against a food processor with a grating blade. The principle difference in this case between the Ninja Pulse and the Ninja Professional Blender is the number of blades – the pulse has two whereas the NPB has three. I would expect similar results from both Ninja products.

I did this on a fairly dreary day, and no amount of post processing could make it look nice outside, so I am giving you the true-to-life photos of what it looked like on the day I did this!

GRATING CHEESE WITH THE NINJA PULSE

I used one standard block of cheddar and one standard block of mozzarella for this project, but cut them in half. I used half a block in the Ninja Pulse, and half a block in my food processor.

All I did was cut the cheese into 2” cubes and pulse 9-10 times until cheese was “grated.”

Cheddar	Mozzarella

You can see the final result is more like cheese crumbles than grated cheese. Let’s compare this to the food processor with the grating blade. For this, I used a very simple and cheap Hamilton Beach food processor.

You can see in both of the middle photos above that I ended up with quite a bit of “cheese blobs” in both cases, but there were substantially more blobs with the softer mozzarella, which resulted in less yield of the actual grated cheese.

Side-by-Side Comparison – Cheddar

This photo does a pretty good job of showing you the different end product. The food processor definitely produced a more “grated” cheese effect.

Side-by-Side Comparison – Mozzarella

Again, with the mozzarella, the food processor did a better job of grating, but there wasn’t quite as much of a difference as with the cheddar.

THE VERDICT

As you can see, the Ninja will grind up the cheese fairly effortlessly. However, it doesn’t produce grated cheese in the traditional sense. For what it’s worth, I used the Ninja-grated mozzarella on pizza and it melted just as evenly as traditionally-grated cheese.

I think this comes down to whether or not you have multiple appliances. If you don’t have a box grater or food processor with a grating blade, the Ninja will do the job. If you’re picky about appearances, you should probably look into other grating options!