How to Clean a Grinder After Grinding Spices
Freshly ground spices just taste better than their powdered counterparts, but in order to use freshly ground spices, they must actually be ground. If you’re the type of person who has a dedicated spice mill: great. I love this for you. But some of us don’t have room for two grinders in our lives. Some of us use a coffee grinder to grind spices.
Grinders do a great job at grinding whole spices, but the aromatic powdery particles tend to stick to the inside of your grinder and its blades. Even if you wipe off the particles with a damp paper towel, oils and other contaminants may remain while waiting for the coffee to flavor. It doesn’t really matter with some spices like cardamom, for example, but most people don’t want their coffee to taste like roasted cumin.
Grinding the coffee in a coffee grinder will get rid of the bad smell over time, but you will have to sacrifice the coffee. Don’t use good things for this. Good coffee is expensive and shouldn’t be used for cleaning, even if you’re looking for an odor-free grinder. Just use crappy coffee instead.
It doesn’t even have to be crappy beans – crappy ground coffee will do. I use Folgers. I’m not sure if it absorbs the flavor of the spices or just masks them, but I know I can’t taste them, and that’s the whole point. Wiping off as much of the ground spices as I can with a damp paper towel, I pour a couple tablespoons of crappy coffee into the grinder, grind it for about 30 seconds, then pour out the coffee and wipe the grinder with a damp paper towel again. My coffee grinder is then ready to grind the good beans again without cumin (or whatever).