Last weekend when making YumSugar's lamb — which was to die for! — my dad and I ran into a little problem. After toasting the cardamom seeds, the recipe asked you to grind them in a spice grinder. Yum used her mortar and pestle, but our mortar was missing! How on earth were we supposed to grind spices without a spice-grinding machine or a mortar and pestle? The solution is super simple, something that you can do at home! To find out what we did, read more.
Most kitchens have a black-peppercorn hand grinder. We removed the black peppercorns and filled the grinder with toasted cardamom seeds. To ensure that the spices end up in the grinder pour them into a small measuring cup. Next grind the seeds onto the lamb as you would black pepper. This technique can be used with other seeds or spice blends.
L'Autre Chose
Calida
Comfort
Genius! If I had encountered this problem I would have put the spices in my coffee grinder, probably a horrible idea.
1Nope, the coffee grinder works fine, plenty of people keep a "spice" one just for that reason.
2Great idea...
3How crafty! I think that's brilliant.
4Now that's thinking on the run. That old UC education is starting to pay off.
5you can grind some bread in it afterwards to remove all the spice so your pepper doesnt taste like caraway or cardamom or whatever
6if you have more that one spice in there, you should make sure you grind it all first and then apply it to the meat, or the taste wont really be very uniform...
7What a smarty! Good thinking, I never would have thought of it! Alton Brown would be proud!!
8My boyfriend cum fiancee bought me a thing called a Spice Boy for Xmas that's like an extra big grinder for all your spices. I used it with some rosemary the other day and I really liked it--no more pine needle-feeling thingies in my mouth!
9I used the bottom of a heavy glass and a glass cutting board as a mortar and pestle when my brother stole mine. Worked fine until I could get him to replace mine.
10if you put the on a cutting board you can also use the bottom of a saute pan to crush them...we do this in school all the time with peppercorns, because for a culinary school they kinda provide us with some crummy pepper grinders
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