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By Joy Manning. Joy Manning. Joy Manning is a writer, editor, and recipe developer focused on food and health. Our Top Picks. Best Overall:. Best for Small Kitchens:. Its relatively compact size and manageable weight less than 3 pounds are ideal for small spaces.
Best for Dry Spices:. Best Budget:. It's inexpensive without sacrificing style and quality. Best Design:. If you want to make a statement, this stunning white mortar with a wooden handle might be the one for you. Best for Guacamole:. Best Large:. View On Amazon. The 7 Best Garlic Presses of Good to Know Like cast iron cookware, most mortar and pestle sets need to be seasoned before use.
View On Williams-Sonoma. The 7 Best Pasta Makers in The 8 Best Blenders in Final Verdict If you want a sturdy pestle set that excels at dry and wet mixtures, the ChefSofi Mortar and Pestle Set view at Amazon will never let you down.
The 7 Best Tortilla Presses in Continue to 5 of 7 below. Your Privacy Rights. Discontinued for shipping Not at your store. Check stores. Home Basics Bamboo Mortar and Pestle. Sold and shipped by Home Basics. Free standard shipping Not in stores. Sold and shipped by eForCity.
Home Basics Marble Mortar and Pestle. Choose options. Verve Culture Molcajete. Matches for "and pestle" 2 results. Buy 2 get 1 free on activites, games, movies and books.
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Where this mortar and pestle fails, though, is at breaking down tougher ingredients, such as the ones that go into a Thai curry paste. The large wooden pestle just doesn't have the same intense striking force that the Thai granite one does, which means it struggles to grind dense, hard spices as finely, let alone produce a curry paste that's properly paste-like. On top of that, the marble is more prone to staining, as you can see in the below photo. The Thai red chilies left their mark though these stains eventually faded with subsequent use.
For this reason, the Thai granite mortar and pestle is my overall top pick: It works better as an alternative for making pesto than the Mediterranean one does as an alternative for making curry pastes.
But, and this is a big but , if you know you won't make curry pastes with your mortar and pestle, the Mediterranean one is my top pick for you. You can always use a smaller marble or granite mortar and pestle to grind spices, and this one does the absolute best job with pestos, mayos, and the like. It's by far the most pleasurable to use.
You can buy one from this seller on Etsy. They come in a variety of sizes, though I got t he 24cm model. It's not cheap, and neither is the shipping, but it'll last you a lifetime and make an amazing family heirloom for future generations. Small mortars and pestles, of about one cup in volume, have many fewer uses in the kitchen, but that doesn't mean they're not an essential tool.
They're less versatile, but no less important. Above all else, they're good for grinding whole spices into a powder. This may sound hard to believe, but I often prefer a small mortar and pestle for grinding spices over a dedicated electric spice grinder. In the time it takes to get a spice grinder out of my cabinet, unwind its cord, plug it in, load it up, grind my spices, completely empty it, and then clean it always a drag!
I use a spice grinder these days only if I'm making a very large batch of ground spices that would take more time to do by hand. Just toss in a few cloves or pieces, smash them up, and you're done.
People also use them to crush pills and do other nonculinary tasks, but that's beyond the scope of this article. Success depends on having the right small mortar and pestle. I tried three types—an all-marble build, a brass one, and a wooden one—to figure out which kind worked best.
Throughout my tests on smaller mortars and pestles, the marble one I used consistently came out on top. A small granite one would work just as well. The brass mortar and pestle, while very handsome, had such a smooth interior that most ingredients just slid around, avoiding being crushed. The wooden one, meanwhile, had no heft; it made me imagine what chewing hard foods without teeth would be like. As you can see in the photos below, the marble mortar and pestle did a much better job of grinding black peppercorns than the other two did.
A big part of its advantage was the abrasive quality of the unpolished stone surfaces. Once again, that abrasive stone surface had a lot to do with its success. Of course, this doesn't mean that brass and wooden mortars and pestles are to be avoided at all costs, or that they're not good for anything. I'm linking to several different sets here because there's a lot of variety at this size of mortar and pestle, and all the ones shown will work similarly well.
Choose whichever design appeals the most. The world is a big place, and pretty much everywhere in it has at least one type of mortar and pestle, if not multiple. Most have evolved to work with the specific culinary traditions from which they originate, and so there's hardly a way to be comprehensive about all the mortars and pestles one could own and use. That's part of what makes an interest in mortars and pestles fun.
When you travel to a country or region that has a cuisine you're interested in cooking back home, you can try to learn more about the mortar and pestle options there, and maybe bring one back with you. I'll say from personal experience that, while it's hard to compete with cooking an Italian meal in Italy itself, using a gorgeous Italian mortar and pestle gives me some feeling of being transported there. So, though I can't cover every mortar and pestle out there beyond the basic types I discussed above, there are a couple I want to call out.
The first is from Japan; the second is from Mexico. In Japan, the mortar is called suribachi and the pestle surikogi. The suribachi is usually made from pottery, while the surikogi is almost always some type of hardwood. The most distinctive feature of this mortar and pestle is the series of ridges scored into the pottery on the unglazed interior of the bowl.
These ridges are called kushi-no-me in Japanese, and they add more abrasiveness than what you'll find in the smoother interiors of many other mortars.
The most common use for a suribachi is grinding sesame seeds, which pop and crumble against those ridges as the pestle swirls around, producing a paste that's fresher and more aromatic than premade sesame pastes. Other uses include mashing tofu, grinding spices, and even grinding meat, like chicken to make tsukune chicken meatballs. Many people also use their suribachi for non-Japanese cuisine.
I haven't tested it yet, but I've read that it can do a good job with pesto, for instance. Certainly, though, if you plan to cook much Japanese food at home, the suribachi will eventually make itself quite useful. Suribachi come in a variety of sizes, but I've found that a medium or large size is easiest for grinding sesame seeds. I'm a big fan of the products sold by Toiro Kitchen, including its suribachi. Also, make sure to order a bamboo scraper, which is very helpful for cleaning out the ridges after grinding.
In Mexico, the molcajete is the mortar, while the tejolote or temolote is the pestle. They're made from porous volcanic rock, which ends up making it difficult to find a good one. Many companies sell "molcajetes" made from granite or some other rock—I've even heard of less scrupulous vendors making them from concrete—which you should avoid.
The porous rock is key here, once again adding an abrasive element to help grind down pepper skins and seeds and other stubborn ingredients. A trip to Mexico is arguably the easiest way to track down a good, real molcajete, but you can find them in the States , too.
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