Salter coffee and spice grinder review

How easy is the Salter coffee and spice grinder to use?

Controlled by a simple on/off button, this spice grinder is a doddle to use. The button is responsive and light touch, meaning there’s no risk of straining when holding it down. The grinding bowl is large and wide, so spices can be easily poured in.

With a bowl capacity of 60g, you can grind a significant amount of spices in seconds. A guide, such as a maximum-fill line on the inside of the bowl, would have been useful as it’s difficult to visualise 60g if not following a recipe.

Some cord storage is provided on the base of the spice grinder if you want to shorten the length of the flex cord for safety on the kitchen counter or easily store it.

Our biggest gripe about this spice grinder is the fact that the inner bowl isn’t removable. This not only makes clean up difficult and less thorough, but also feels a little unsafe to do. Because there's no way to submerge the grinding bowl, a slight build up of fine dust forms around the central spindle and underside of the blades. Dust and water can also get trapped between the rim of the lid and the plastic. Try as we might, we couldn’t remove this.

After cleaning, we also noticed a slight residual smell inside the bowl – stronger spices like cumin and coriander were the prominent smells.

Results

We ground a range of large (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom) and small spices (peppercorns, cumin seeds, coriander seeds), as well as coffee beans to put this model to the test.

This model grinds large spices well and performs best when grinding nutmeg. It has a fine, sandy and evenly ground texture and requires running the grinder for the full 30 seconds. Some woody, textural parts of both the cinnamon stick and cardamom pods remain, but the vast majority of each ingredient is a fine powdery texture.

Grinding smaller spices is where this model excels. Peppercorns, cumin seeds and coriander seeds are all perfectly milled to a super-fine texture.

Coffee beans can also be finely ground without releasing any oils. Due to the 60g capacity, you’ll only be able to make one or two cups of coffee at a time, but this is ideal if you’re looking to make the freshest cup possible. The beans take less than 30 seconds to grind.

When grinding, some of the fine spices gather on the underside of the lid and around the rim, which means that when taking the lid off the grinder, the spices can spill out, which wasn’t ideal. We recommend combatting this by giving the grinder a good tap around the outside to dislodge any spices before opening.

Conclusion

If you grind a lot of spices for spice rubs or marinades and are looking for something to speed up the process, this model produces high-quality results. Woodier ingredients like cinnamon or cardamom pods won’t be milled in their entirety, but the vast majority of the spice will. Clean up is a bit of a faff though, as the bowl isn’t removable. For dry spices and coffee beans, this is a budget-friendly choice.

Specifications

Wattage: 200
What can it grind? spices and coffee
Accessories: none
Dimensions (cm): H: 19 x W: 12.6 x D: 12.6
Capacity: 60g

Recipes with spices

Green curry paste
Basa Gede (Balinese spice paste)
Lamb vindaloo
Tom Kerridge's madras curry paste
Jerk spice mix
Ras el hanout spice mix
Five-spice mix
Garam masala spice mix

This review was last updated in May 2021. If you have any questions, suggestions for future reviews or spot anything that has changed in price or availability please get in touch at goodfoodwebsite@immediate.co.uk