One of my favorite kitchen tools is our pepper grinder. We have ground our own pepper corns for many years. In fact, you can't even find one of those tin boxes of ground pepper in our home. Usually we buy the 4 pepper blend from Penzey's because we like it so much.
In all our years of cooking together, we have gone through a lot of pepper grinders. Started out with the cheap ones with plastic gears. That certainly didn't work. Went to wooden grinders with metal gears and that just didn't do the job. Then about 25 years ago I was in the kitchen area of a department store when I came upon a clearance table. Oh, yes, I would rather buy kitchen gadgets than anything else in the world. There stood this beautiful brass object that was labeled Turkish coffee bean grinder. I took it apart and carefully looked at the mechanism and said to myself, "this will grind pepper corns." And, it has ever since. I think the price at that time was something silly like $10.
I promise you, if you ever come across anything like this, consider it for grinding your pepper corns. I simply love it and it is my favorite kitchen utensil.
I have a small grinder just like that from Bosnia. It was used to grind coffee by hand. Mike
ReplyDeleteOh yah, and that was some potent coffee, wasn't it? Good memories for you.
ReplyDeleteI have the exact same one..only I work in a recycling plant in Nova Scotia and I found my treasure on the sorting line! After putting it through my dishwasher I too use it for grinding peppercorns..no tin cans of pepper in my home either!
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