Is this the trick for even tastier ground pepper?
We think a pepper mill is one of the basics you absolutely need to have at home. Which one you choose is of course entirely up to you, whether it’s an indestructible classic Peugeot mill (I have, for example, a now retro-modern rectangular plexiglass model that has been in the family since the 1980s) or one of those handy supermarket mills… But this suggestion did make us do a double take!
Because British-born TV chef Robert Irvine has a very unusual idea about what you should use instead of a standard mill to grind pepper. According to him, pepper from an ordinary mill tastes like sawdust, and who wants that? No, in his opinion, you’d be better off using this:
Hot pepper
A coffee grinder! Why? Because there is friction around the blades of a coffee grinder as they make their rapid movements, which creates heat. That heat then warms the peppercorns as they are ground, which in turn helps the aromas and flavor come out better, according to Irvine.
Aroma and flavor
Interesting, isn’t it? And not such a far-fetched theory, either. If you browse barista forums for a while, you’ll see that heating coffee while it is being ground is considered undesirable because too much flavor and aroma would already be released before the coffee even comes into contact with water, causing them to be lost. With pepper, the advantage would be that it goes straight into or onto a dish, so hopefully you get nothing but the benefits of those released special qualities.
Extra work
The only thing is that you would probably need an extra coffee grinder, because you’re obviously not going to clean the thing every time you want to make coffee. Unless you like an extra spicy espresso 😉
Also read:
- Aha! So that’s what the cap on your pepper and salt mill is for!
- These 9 things you want to know about espresso
- All the things you can do with Sichuan pepper
