3 Genius Cheese Hacks

Whether you're whipping up old favorites, like mac and cheese, queso dip or grilled cheese sandwiches, or looking for fancy new ways to serve and cook with cheese, these pro tips are a cut above.

Make Grating (and Cleanup) a Breeze

Cheese stuck to your grater. Loose shreds all over your cutting board (and floor). Such are the problems with grating, but they're easy to solve. The key is spraying your grater with cooking spray, so the cheese glides instead of sticks, resulting in nicely defined, clean shreds instead of clumps. You can also make kitchen prep cleaner and faster by grating over parchment paper like this. Then use the paper as a funnel to neatly place your freshly grated ingredients wherever they belong—whether that's straight into the bowl of a food processor for this cheese ball, stirred into these savory pancakes (shown below) or atop this squash gratin. When you're grating three kinds of cheese for a fully loaded frittata, these tips will get it on the table faster.

Upgrade Your Grilled Cheese

Tasting Table's food editor, Andy Baraghani, is so obsessed with creating the right texture for his filling that he actually blitzes it in a food processor to make a loose paste (see the recipe) that spreads into a perfectly consistent layer. Having friends over (or just really hungry)? Line up as many sandwiches as you can fit on a baking sheet (or two) and put them in a 350-degree oven for five to 10 minutes.

Elevate Cheese Sauce

This simple technique adds cheesy flavor and unexpected texture to savory dishes: Chef Benjamin Murray of Azul at Mandarin Oriental, Miami makes a béchamel sauce (milk thickened with a roux), adds cheese, then places it in an iSi Gourmet Whip canister and adds three nitrous-oxide cartridges: "This aerates the cheese sauce into a really nice, light 'foam,' also called an espuma in Spain," he explains.