Cuisinart Style Collection Electric Spice & Nut Grinder | Midnight Grey | SG21U

Product Information

Probably unsurprisingly, KitchenAid, one of the leaders in kitchen gadgets, earned the spot of best multipurpose spice grinder with its dual coffee and spice grinder. Unlike other grinders, which require thorough cleaning between different spices—or when you switch from coffee grinding to spice grinding—the KitchenAid comes with three separate stainless steel grinding bowls. There are several great spice grinders out there, but the Secura Electric Coffee and Spice Grinder earned the best overall spot for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that it has two separate milling bowls: One for grinding dry ingredients and the other for chopping wet ingredients. The bowls also have measurement markings on the inside, so you can easily add what you need without using separate measuring spoons. This grinder includes a clear plastic cover that sits on top of the stainless steel bowl to keep ground ingredients from flying out as the blades spin.

Lindsay Boyers is a certified holistic nutritionist with extensive nutrition knowledge and cooking experience. She’s developed over 1,000 original recipes and is constantly on a mission to find the best kitchen gadgets, at the best prices, to help make life in the kitchen more streamlined and efficient.Electric spice grinders typically work by using a spinning blade to pulverize whole spices and herbs into powder. Manual grinders use a ceramic or metal (usually carbon or stainless steel) mechanism to crush spices, salt, and pepper to the desired grind.

The design of this grinder makes it an excellent choice for anyone with manual dexterity problems, especially since, instead of pressing down on an on/off button, you can activate the motor by pushing down on the entire lid instead. The Secura also brings power in a compact, counter-friendly size. The 200-watt motor can easily handle most spices as well as larger items like nuts and coffee beans, while the built-in overheat protection extends its lifespan so you can keep it around for a while.If you don’t need the power of an electric grinder, but you still want an easy and effective way to add freshly ground spices to your dishes, the Kuhn Rikon Ratchet Grinder is one of the most user-friendly manual spice grinders on the market. This Swiss-designed model has a door on the front of its body that you can open and use to easily fill the spice chamber with one dried spice or a combination to create your own spice blend. Although there aren’t any programmed settings that allow you to control grind size, the grinder comes with a clear lid that allows you to see what you’re doing so you can stop grinding when your spices reach the desired fineness. Lifting the lid releases a visible twine of vapour, the unfolding presence of aromatic oils; you feel yourself an alchemist, if not a demigod. In addition to blasphemous urges, the machine supplies two grinding bowls with airtight lids, doubling as storage. Good for coffee beans or extra spice mix. (I no longer store mine in unlabelled baggies, sniffed at indiscriminately, a hapless dealer high on his own asafoetida.) It’s brilliant at wet rubs and pastes, too – messing chilli, garlic and galangal with fish sauce takes no time. And the dishwashable brushed metal doesn’t taint or transfer smells. The two-blade grinding bowl is meant for handling dried ingredients from herbs, like rosemary and thyme, to spices, like peppercorns and cardamom. Our tester noted that it created a fairly consistent, fine grind on most spices and worked beautifully to create enough freshly ground pepper for cacio e pepe in about 10 seconds. She noted that lightweight herbs like mint had a hard time staying down near the blade, so the results were less even, but these types of herbs generally don't need a super consistent grind. Our tester liked that each end has an adjustable grinder, so you can select the desired fineness or coarseness of your spice. It's attractive enough to keep on the table for mealtimes or stash next to the stove to use while cooking.

The Shardor Coffee and Spice Grinder was expertly designed to be the perfect multitasking tool. It comes with two stainless steel bowls. The first is a two-blade grinder bowl that handles dry items, like spices and coffee beans. The other is a four-blade chopper bowl that can wet-grind garlic and herbs, like basil, eliminating the need for manual mincing as you cook. Grinding whole cloves and allspice should generally not be done in any grinder with plastic parts, as the oils tend to degrade and cloud the plastic. Instead, use a traditional mortar and pestle to crush these spices into a fine powder. What to Look For in a Spice Grinder Capacity Pestle and mortar: Made up of a heavy bowl (mortar) and a club-shaped tool (pestle), this is a primitive and centuries-old means of grinding spices and other foods. These come in a range of sizes, from small ones no bigger than a teacup to large Mexican molcajete. Pestle and mortars are versatile as both dry and wet mixes can be ground in them.KitchenAid Blade Coffee and Spice Grinder: This comes equipped with two bowls with different blades, one for spices with a winged blade and one for coffee with a straight blade. The one for coffee performed poorly, leaving lots of large and unevenly processed cumin seeds. The spice bowl performs better, but only slightly. It's slow to grind, has an uneven grind, low capacity, and the opaque lid makes it difficult to see inside the bowl to monitor the grinding process. The spice bowl performed better with 20 grams of spices than with 10, but it can't do much more than that, resulting in a limited sweet spot where it grinds well. Spice gets under the removable cup, where the ridged surface makes it difficult to clean.