Ideally I'd get two millstones, which grind finely, perfectly, and with zero labor--hence villages being built around them for thousands of years. Unfortunately for me, I don't have access to a watermill or windmill at my apartment, so I need to regress to cavemen's tools for my occasional crushing and grinding. Pestles are the hand tools and mortars are the receptacles; every civilization has their own. Paleolithic cavemen used holes in cave floors. Neolithic cavemen invented portable holes. Biblical Jews shared millstones in a village. Frenchmen use Peugeot handmills because fuck your village. Greeks use olivewood for aioli or whatever. Italians use marble for pesto because "it emulsifies better" (read: it's a delicate display piece). Japs use suribachi to grind moldy rice into miso. Weebs use suribachi to collect dust in their cabinets. Indians use electric blade grinders because they're grinding dried spices. Mexicans use molcajetes to grind avocados into guacamole. And so on. My ideal mortar would be as large as I can carry and would come with both straight and mushroom pestles. A straight pestle seems best for crushing and a mushroom pestle seems best for grinding. Amazon does not sell this ideal set. America's Test Kitchen used to recommend the Cilio Granite David mortar and pestle, but I haven't been able to find it for sale. Their criteria (which have since been paywalled as far as I can tell) boiled down to the mortar being huge and the pestle being heavy, and applying these criteria to what I see when browsing aisles makes every retail mortar and pestle look like junk. So I've been using my blade grinder and food processor for some mortar and pestle jobs like pesto and non-pepper spice grinding. I'd like to get something that fulfills my caveman desire to smash things.

Suribachi also look like they suck for anything that isn't koji.

>>478 Look for a brass pharmacist pestle, used on fleabay.

>>478 I have a small-ish (13cm) marble one with slight grooves that I use to grind all my spices. It's good. Just add a pinch of salt or sugar to help it go quicker. I like the white coloring since it shows how well it's been cleaned so there's less risk of contaminating flavors. I mostly grind dried berries or more woody stuff with it, and the few times I've ground herbs it's a bitch. Been looking for a much larger one to grind meat in, and it's a struggle.

>>484 Wouldn't brass potentially react or tarnish if you were putting certain acids in it? >>499 >It's good. Just add a pinch of salt or sugar to help it go quicker. This is good advice. Obviously it has to be actual salt that's not already ground into oblivion or it won't really work i.e. don't just use table salt.

>>484 >>500 My thoughts exactly; I wouldn't make pesto with lemon juice in brass. >>499 My only real interest in marble mortars is because they're the easiest to inspect and buy in person. Marble doesn't seem abrasive enough to do the jobs I'd like to do, and marble's solubility concerns me as well. They're probably the prettiest though.

Don't buy mortars online, at least not extra large ones. They often get damaged in transit by incompetents and lugging a large mortar to the next post office to return it is a bitch.

I have a granite mortar and pestle I bought online and never had an issue. Unfortunately, my pestle broke in half because it fell on the ground. I need to epoxy it together.

Once my cheap blender breaks, I'm getting a Molcajete. One of the cool ones that looks like a bull or a pig. Pic #2 upper right corner is what I have right now, about to make a red sauce. Someone gave it to me second-hand. It's a bit small, but it gets the job done.

>>987 Why go thru the trouble of sharpening your nice non poor-fag knife and then blunting it in one stroke with a stone cutting board? Splurge for a nice wooden one, if you can maintain it, or buy a costco 40-pack of 1 dollar plastic ones you throw away when they get iffy.

>>1019 >touching your food with cancer-causing plastic

>>1054 >getting silicosis from sillica particles

>>1019 >>1054 Nevermind cancer, isn't plastic really hard to clean properly? Meat particles can get inside the knife cuts and never come out. Cheap costco plastic boards probably scar easily and provide a nice surface for bacteria to breed undisturbed.

>>1057 >Not eating a tablespoon of diatomaceous earth with every meal

>>1062 >>1057 That reminds me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU77anzCzxg

You can steal a high quality one at the Caldera Mage's Guild. It's easy.

>>1060 Overblown risk. Plastic is very similar to wood: yes it's porous, yes stuff gets in between, but it's safe as long as you clean it properly. If someone's the kind of autistic who would only rinse it then yes, they'll get extra botulism or something.

I ended up buying this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W4W2BZ7 It's fine I guess. It doesn't seem like switching between the two pestles makes a difference, but the mortar is about as big as the biggest I've ever seen.

>>1193 Is it one proper piece or do you get granules coming off the material?

>>1019 The board isn't stone, although the color makes it look like it is. It's one of those plastic ones. My wooden one given to me by a friend is too old and worn out (gaps in the wood) to be used. I need to get a new one.

>>1226 Proper, as far as I can tell. I've yet to notice any grit.

>>987 >Molcajete I'd like to know of some recipes that utilize a Molcajete.