If you shred your own cheese, you’ll avoid eating cellulose, which is an additive found in packaged shredded cheese. However, that’s not why I shred my own cheese. I do it to (potentially) save money and because I know I’ll definitely wind up with a much tastier product. You’ll find that it’s easy to shred most cheeses; there are tricks for shredding especially soft ones. Recipes calling for shredded cheese usually ask for it by volume, but if you buy it in a block, it’ll be sold by weight, so you’ll have to understand how to properly do the conversion. You may also want to know a few things about storing it if you have some leftover.

Cellulose Powder

One of the common objections to buying shredded cheese is that it contains cellulose, which prevents the shreds from clumping. Obviously, if you don’t want to eat cellulose, then you shouldn’t buy shredded cheese. On the other hand, if I said, “Hey, I’ll shred your cheese for you if you’ll agree to eat some pulp I ground up from a tree I cut down out back” and you said, “Hell yeah, man! Bring it on!” then you should stop reading this post and go buy yourself some shredded cheese.

Cheaper and Better

To me, the more compelling reasons are cost and quality. If you care enough to do it, buy a block of cheese and a package of shredded cheese – same type, same brand. Bring them home and do a taste test. The cheese you shred yourself will be fresher and tastier by a clear and laughable margin. Then compare the price. You’d think the shredded cheese would be more expensive because of the extra labor involved in producing it, but that’d be a pretty old-fashioned view of pricing strategy. My casual observation is that it may or may not be the case that un-shredded cheese is less expensive than shredded, but when it is, it’s not by such a difference that you’re going to save enough money to buy that Ferrari 250 you’ve had your eye on. However, my second not-quite-as-casual observation is that the better the cheese, the less likely you’ll find it pre-shredded. Moral of the story: pre-packaged shredded cheese is a less-tasty version of a mediocre cheese.

Shredding Cheese

Is it difficult to shred cheese yourself? Yes, if you’re going to use a hand shredder. But why would you, when I’m sure you have a food processor somewhere among your kitchen possessions? Shredding cheese with a processor is not only easy, it’s fun. How to:

1. If the shape and size of your block of cheese will prevent it from passing through your food processor’s chute, make as few cuts as possible to remedy the situation. For example, the wide end of this wedge of Parmesan won’t fit in my processor, so I have to slice it into two wedges. One slice is all it takes.
2. Then, I reorient the wedges and I wind up with a rectangle that seems almost custom made for the size of my chute.
3. Use the plunger to push the cheese through your shredding attachment.
4. Dump the shredded cheese into an airtight container and keep it in the fridge.

Will it clump? Sort of. Will it bother you? It depends. Are you OCD? Even if you’re not, a soft cheese will clump, especially if you really hard pack it.  However, a hard cheese, like Parmesan, will not clump. Keeping it loose-packed in Tupperware will discourage clumping. Home-shredded cheese will age and eventually deteriorate quicker than pre-packaged shredded cheese, but it will take a long, long time. In my house, we’ll eat the cheese way before that. If you live in a different house – which is probably true, because if you lived with me, we’d both know it – you might need to store your shredded cheese in the freezer. Note that at the end of your shredding, there’s always one or two small pieces that get stuck between the lid and the disk and don’t shred. That’s not bad. It’s good. You get to eat those pieces or share them with your best little buddy (read “German shepherd”).

Note that there are special methods for shredding soft cheeses.

Measuring

When it comes to measuring a block of cheese vs. shredded cheese, you run into the problem of volume vs. weight. You actually run into this problem whether you shred your own cheese or not, but cheese manufacturers try to help you out with it when they give weight and cup measurements on packages of shredded cheese. Here’s how it works: if you buy an 8-ounce block of cheese and shred it, you’ll have 8-ounces of shredded cheese. Duh. However, those 8 ounces will fill 3 cups, loosely packed. If you ask the internet, it will tell you that 1 cup equals 8 ounces. Therefore, by shredding your cheese, you have apparently tripled the amount, since 3 cups equals 24 ounces. If only that were true, your cost savings would skyrocket! But alas, you still have 8 ounces by weight, which is (in this case) 3 cups by volume. (The internet, like most of us, defaults to a measurement of liquid volume.)

Why I Shred My Own Cheese