Jim Peyton's Lo Mexicano - Mexican Food, Cooking and Recipes
(From time to time when Jim finds a particularly useful product or ingredient for Mexican cooking he will share it with the visitors to this site. Please be assured that if he ever has a financial interest in any of these items it will be disclosed).
SUMEET MULTI GRIND
For some time I had been looking for two items. One, I needed a replacement for the electric coffee grinder I bought twenty five years ago and use as a spice grinder. Unfortunately, all those I had tried did not perform well, especially on small amounts of spices.
The other item I was searching for was an appliance that would do a really good job of grinding rehydrated dried chiles. As some of you may know, many Mexican dishes, including the moles, are made with dried chiles. In Mexico the chiles are usually toasted to bring out their flavor, then soaked in water to make them soft. The next step is to grind them. Traditionally this was either painstakingly done at home on metates or in molcajetes, Mexico's famous stone appliances, or brought to a communal mill where they could be ground on huge mill stones. The results of both these methods produce silk smooth sauces because the chiles are so finely ground.
More recently, in Mexico and in this country, this grinding task is often performed in blenders, which are quick to use but have four problems. First, extra liquid must usually be added to the blender in order for it to properly grind the ingredients, so the result is not a true paste, but more a thick puree. The second problem is that the blender does not grind the chiles finely enough for the skins to disappear in the sauce. This means they have to be strained out, usually with a food mill, and even this does not produce the exceptionally smooth sauce one finds with the stone ground variety. The third problem is that, because of the design of most blenders it is almost impossible to get all of the puree out of the blender, into the strainer, and from there into the pot. Lastly the process is inordinately messy.
A few months ago, on a whim, I ordered a Multi Grind from an ad in Fine Cooking magazine. The machine is distributed by a Canadian company called Sumeet, and was originally designed to make East Indian curry pastes and powders. It has a six inch diameter base, from which it gradually tapers to the top, a little over 13 inches from the counter. It resembles a rocket ready to be launched, with a huge motor at the base and the vehicle itself at the top in the form of a heavy plastic container, where the actual grinding takes place. The first thing I did was to grind some dried chiles. The Multi Grind effortlessly turned them into powder.
Next I decided to make asado de boda, which is a simple, northern Mexican version of a mole. I soaked the chiles, drained them thoroughly and processed them for the recommended 1 ½ minutes. They were very smooth but I detected a few bits of chile skin. I processed them for another 30 seconds and discovered a perfect paste with no trace of skins. The end result was that the asado de boda was noticeably better than any I had previously made, due entirely to the smoothness of the chile base. And equally rewarding was the fact that the whole thing was done with no mess and a very easy cleanup.
Although I am no engineer the secrets of the Multi Grind's success are obvious. First of all it just shouts "Heavy Duty Commercial Appliance." It has a huge motor which does not stall or bind as do those of so many blenders. The grinding is done at the top of the machine rather than at the bottom, so that you don't have to fish around with long spoons as you try to remove the ingredients; you simply spoon them into wherever you want them to go. And remember all those times that you had to stop your blender, open it and scrape down the sides? Not with the Multi Grind. It has a device built into the top that can be turned while the machine is running, in order to return ingredients from the sides of the container to the whirling blades, which is where you want them. The only possible disadvantage I could find with the machine was that the capacity, while adequate for home use, was not sufficient for even small restaurant purposes. However, I have since learned that Sumeet has another product, designed more for commercial use, that includes a grinder with a much larger capacity as well as a traditional blender with several different blades. I hope to have the opportunity to test one of these in the near future, and will advise you of the results.
In conclusion, I thought the approximately $80 I paid for the Multi Grind was quite reasonable. The machine can be purchased direct from Sumeet by calling (800) 268-1530. Sumeet Website.
