Rosa Whittaker bought a granite mortar and pestle from a Thai grocery on Spadina Avenue in Toronto in October of 2017, eight years after she had decided that a mortar and pestle was, for a home cook, a piece of romantic kitchen-equipment cosplay that would sit on a shelf and gather dust.
She had been wrong. The mortar is now in nightly use.
The piece weighs roughly four kilograms. The bowl is about 18 centimetres across at the rim and 10 centimetres deep, with a slightly rough interior surface that catches spices and grinds them by friction. The pestle is about 16 centimetres long, with a flared head that fits the curve of the bowl. The whole thing cost forty-two Canadian dollars in 2017 and would cost about sixty today.
What changed her mind was a single meal. A Thai cooking class at a community centre in Parkdale, taught by a woman named Achara Phromsuk, who began the class by handing each student a small granite mortar and a packet of dried chiles, lemongrass, garlic, and shallots, and demonstrating how to pound them into a curry paste in about eight minutes.
The paste was bright. It was layered. The lemongrass had been bruised in a way that released oils that no blade had ever extracted. The garlic was not a paste in the food-processor sense; it was crushed, and the cells had ruptured, and the flavour was different.
Whittaker went home and bought a mortar the next morning.
This piece is about why a mortar and pestle, the right one used the right way, is not redundant in a kitchen that already owns a knife and a food processor. It is about the specific things the mortar does better, and the specific situations where reaching for it is the right call.
The first thing is curry paste. Thai, Malaysian, Sri Lankan, and southern Indian curry pastes are all built on a foundation of crushed aromatics — lemongrass, galangal, chiles, garlic, shallots, coriander root, dried spices. A food processor can purée these into a smooth wet paste. A mortar bruises them, ruptures their cells, and releases oils in a way that produces a noticeably more aromatic result.
The difference is not subtle. Whittaker has done blind tastings with five different cooks. Five out of five preferred the mortar-pounded version of the same recipe. The food processor version was good. The mortar version was better.
The second thing is pesto. Genoese pesto, in its traditional form, is made by pounding basil, garlic, pine nuts, and salt with a stone pestle and then stirring in olive oil and Parmesan. A food processor produces a perfectly acceptable pesto. The mortar produces a pesto that is slightly brighter, slightly greener, with the basil leaves bruised rather than chopped. The flavour holds together more cohesively.
The third thing is small batches of spice. Whole spices — cumin seed, coriander seed, peppercorns, fennel — toasted in a dry pan and then ground in a mortar produce a more aromatic result than the same spices pre-ground from a jar, and a more controlled result than the same spices ground in an electric coffee grinder, which tends to over-process and to release heat that drives off volatile aromas.
An electric grinder is faster. A mortar is better. For two teaspoons of toasted cumin, the mortar takes ninety seconds, and the result is worth it.
The fourth thing is garlic for things that need garlic to disappear. A mortar-pounded garlic paste, with a pinch of salt, becomes a smooth purée with no chunky bits, which is what is wanted in a Caesar dressing or an aioli or the base of a romesco. A microplane gets you to the same place, more or less, but a mortar handles a whole head at once without the awkwardness of pressing nubs of garlic against an etched blade.
What the mortar is not for: large batches. Anything more than about a cup of finished paste is genuine work, and at that point a food processor is the right tool. The mortar is for small batches of high-aromatic things.
On the choice of mortar: this matters more than for most kitchen tools. There are several traditions of design.
Granite mortars in the Thai style, like Whittaker's, are heavy and rough-interiored. They are the right tool for curry pastes and for any application requiring forceful pounding. They are also, at four to six kilograms, a serious permanent presence on the counter.
Marble mortars in the European style are smoother-interiored, often more elegant, and lighter. They are better for pesto and for grinding spices and worse for pounding tough aromatics. The bowl interior is too polished to grind fibrous things like lemongrass effectively.
Molcajetes, the Mexican mortars made of volcanic basalt, are coarse and porous and excellent for guacamole and salsas. They require a curing process — grinding rice and salt in them several times until the slurry comes out white — before first use, to remove loose grit.
Suribachi, the Japanese mortar, has fine ridges molded into the interior glaze, designed for grinding sesame seeds, miso, and ground fish. It is excellent at what it does and not particularly suited to anything else.
If a kitchen is going to own one mortar and one only, Whittaker recommends a Thai granite of roughly the size she owns. It does the most jobs adequately to excellently. It is the most versatile single piece in the category.
Care is essentially nothing. Rinse with hot water and a stiff brush after each use. Avoid soap, which can lodge in the porous granite surface and leave a faint detergent flavour in the next batch of paste. For sticky residue, grind a tablespoon of coarse salt in the bowl, brush it out, rinse, dry, store.
The mortar will outlast everyone in the kitchen. Whittaker's is a small piece of stone that was cut from a quarry somewhere in southeast Asia at an unknown date and shipped to Canada at some point in the early 2010s. It will be in a kitchen, somewhere, in 2126.
She no longer thinks of it as romantic kitchen-equipment cosplay. She thinks of it as the right tool for the eight or ten things it does better than anything else, and as such, a tool that has earned its forty-two dollars and the foot of counter space it occupies, several times over.
