A toothbrush can help dislodge whatever foods have remained trapped in between the grates, both inside and out. You can line your grater with plastic film (or wax paper), to facilitate clean up, but when you start grating your lemon, the friction will shred the film (or paper), into tiny pieces that will usually cling along with the zest, and will thus end up in the finished food product - you don't want this to happen.
Washing the grater: Use warm to hot soapy water. Use your brush, once again, instead of your washcloth or sponge, to clean the grater. The brush is an excellent tool that gets into those small cracks that most cloths and sponges can't. Rinse the grater with warm water, shaking off excess water. Place in plate tray and allow to dry for a few minutes and then dry using an absorbent cloth, or a few paper towels. I always place the towel-dried grater into a warm oven, for about 10 minutes and then turn off the oven and allow it cool down to help dry the grater inside out. If I'm baking something in the oven and can't place it in there, I usually place the grater on the stove top, nearby the oven's exhaust, provided that the exhaust isn't releasing steam from the foods being cooked. By doing this, you can prevent the grater from rusting (even though most food graters claim to be "rust proof") and therefore prolonging its life.
Tidbit. If a cake recipe calls for lemon zest, I always grate the lemon using the finest grate on the grater, to ensure a mushy or paste like lemon zest, instead of using a zester. A zester, in comparison, strips away the zest into thin strips and doesn't grate the citrus peel to produce a mush; it leaves bits of the zest in the finished food. Therefore, by finely grating the lemon with a grater, I can obtain the essence (flavour) of the lemon without any trace of the peel. The finely grated peel usually breaks down during beating and dissolves into the cake by the time the cake has been baked and no traces of lemon peel can be found.
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