Essential Equipment for Spices

We prefer mortars that hold at least 3 cups, have a rough interior to help grip and grind ingredients, and come with a long, heavy pestle that keeps knuckles from scraping the mortar’s edge. Our winner is made from heavy, stable granite and has extra tall sides, which keeps food from escaping. A large, heavy pestle that is comfortable to hold makes grinding a breeze. See everything we tested here.

Fresh-ground spices improve dishes with their superior aroma, vibrancy, and roundness of flavor. The test kitchen standard for grinding spices is an inexpensive blade-type electric coffee grinder. We use this for spices only, and we recommend reserving a separate unit to grind coffee. Find our winner here.

A good, heavy skillet should last a lifetime and cook almost anything. It can be used to bloom or toast spices, as well as to crush peppercorns for recipes that rely on their crunch and flavor, such as pepper-crusted beef tenderloin. Although this method requires a little more elbow grease, we prefer the coarsely cracked peppercorns over the pepper dust that comes from a pepper grinder.

A rasp grater is useful for a number of tasks, such as grating hard cheese, chocolate, citrus zest, or spices like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg. Our favorite rasp grater breezes through all of these tasks with minimal effort, is comfortable to hold, and stays sharp for a good long time. See everything we tested here.

Fresh nutmeg is worth the effort in recipes where it doesn’t have to compete with other spices. It contributes a distinctively heady flavor that we really like. Our winner is a spice rasp grater that has, in addition to a comfortable handle, a slender, tightly curled, 5-inch-long grating surface that provides a good margin of safety for your fingertips. It can produce mounds of nutmeg in no time flat and can also be used for grating nuts and chocolate.