Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/28/no-kitchen-is-complete-with-a-great-molcajete-and-this-one-is-on-sale-for-under-55.html
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“No kitchen is complete with a great molcajete and this one is on sale for under $55”
So don’t buy it? 
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For the person who has everything, eternal want. Decomplete your kitchen today. Pass the curse to someone else to be free.
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You had one job, Headline Writer.
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I bought mine at a local Hispanic market for about twenty bucks. It must be cured before use, and the site outlines a procedure to do so. They don’t mention that it takes several hours of grinding to get it to a useable surface,
I just rinse mine out with very hot water & use a small wisk to clean out the pores; afterwards, I grind a clove of garlic and rinse it a final time. Something like this, you do not use soap to clean.
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“Being volcanic in origin, the molcajete retains heat like a champ, capable of staying hot for up to an hour after coming out of the oven”
What? You don’t cook in a molcajete! It’s a grinding tool, a variety of mortar and pestle. And if you did foolishly cook in it, rock doesn’t hold heat any better just because it’s volcanic. The person who wrote the ad copy doesn’t know what they are talking about.
As others have pointed out - it’s made from porous rock which needs to be prepared before use. That involves grinding dry rice in it for a very long time. That’s the traditional way to do it. It wears away tiny pieces of rock from the newly cut stone that would otherwise get into your food, and the powdered rice gets ground into the pores, and stays there if you treat it properly. If you clean it too thoroughly once it’s in use, you need grind rice into it all over again to fill in the pores.
And the molcajete, since it’s porous, picks up the flavors of whatever you grind in it, which then influences the flavors of everything else you grind in it. You can’t clean those flavors out of it between uses unless you’re prepared to spend a long time grinding rice into the pores again between uses. Yes, it’s useful and safe - and it will violate a lot of Americans’ assumptions about cleanliness.
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So it’s ah, not Incel Renaissance American?
I definitely heard of it first from some nuts North Carolina restaurant (on Twitter) that was cooking 4 meats and whatnot into Rather Deep Bowls of stone like this that of course maniacs consume as theirs alone. Matches up to those Korean week-worth meals?
Well then good news! Some GPT-based bot wrote it. It doesn’t know dick about anything.
Excuse my ignorance but aside from Mexican food what else can you use this for?
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Preparing potions?
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Grinding toasted, whole spices (dry chiles, coriander, cumin, cardamom, peppercorns, tamarind, etc.) for Indian spice dishes.
mine smells like a combination Oaxacan-Punjabi-Thai kitchen with extra garlic! Good for mole, guacamole and curry paste, among other things!
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I don’t cook much in the way of Mexican food, and mine is a more generic mortar and pestle rather than this item specifically, but I use mine to grind up nuts and whole grains for baking, to crush fresh herbs, and to look pretty awesome on my counter.
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A molcajete is the sort of tool most Mexicans wish they had everytime they see one, but never buy because it’s just not practical anymore.
Growing up, most people I know had one in their house but only their grandmas ever used it.
But one day I’ll buy one, just to bring out at parties because it looks so cool.
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Do you use it on actual avocados or is it more for dry things?
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This is permanently true of all StackCommerce product posts.
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In our household, m&ps have, for the most part, replaced our mini food processor (for fine chopping and pulverizing); great for when your recipe needs a paste. And the cleanup is so much easier… and when grinding more than one ingredient together, they also mix together more thoroughly…
… and there’s another advantage: A Persian restaurant owner imparted to us the secret of “stretching” his supply of saffron: Grind it down into a fine powder… and that by using a brass m&p. He was very specific about using brass (due to its smooth, non-porous surface). He has a point. We use saffron much more so than the average household, mostly for Caribbean, Italian, Indian and Middle Eastern dishes. By pulverizing the saffron stamens, we’ve cut our usage by half. Same taste and color imparted to the dishes, and at half the cost. The m&p used for our saffron recipes, though, is an antique, pharmacist’s porcelain affair (a Haldenwanger 55), given to me by my dad when I moved out. It tends to aggressively retain a saffron red color due to the flat finish inside the bowl. (Our granite and wooden m&ps would be worse.) Bottom line: pulverized flavoring ingredients can, in some cases, be used in smaller amounts.
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yes, you can make a complete guacamole in one. messy, but it works just fine. I do the garlic, a little kosh salt and some cilantro from the garden in there first, then squeeze lime and chunk the avocado in there, mix it all up.
wash up, as someone posted upthread needs to be hot water and no soap!
that said, I mainly do dry ingredients and things like fresh garlic, tamarind, lemongrass and ginger, sometimes making a very pungent curry paste
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The animal shaped ones and the volcanic texture are undeniably awesome. I suspect mine is much more low maintenance in that it’s green marble, so there’s not nearly so many pores to fill with rice as described above. The downside is it’s not going to store flavors of cooking past nearly as well. Still, it looks very nice and I have a matching green marble rolling pin so it also lends me an air of knowing what I’m doing in the kitchen.
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