If you grew up using just one type of salt and one type of pepper, the notion of having more than one pepper grinder might seem superfluous. You might be thinking, More than one pepper grinder? What am I, a Kennedy?
Listen, I get it. But that idea doesn’t quite align with the ingredient-abundant kitchens many of us have today. If you’re someone who likes to try new recipes online, or have an enviable trove of dog eared cookbooks on display, it’s likely you have a robust pantry to match. Think about how our collective attitude towards salt has changed. So many cooks keep flaky salt and fine sea salt and kosher salt stationed front and center in the kitchen these days. But pepper should get the same treatment—it’s handy to have multiple types at the ready. That’s why many Epi staffers keep multiple pepper grinders on hand.
Digital director Maggie Hoffman keeps a grinder of her favorite, and most-used black pepper and white pepper, one from Burlap & Barrel and the other Diaspora Co., at the ready in her kitchen in two separate grinders. You can choose to fill your two grinders with the peppers you use most often, like fragrant long pepper, which comes up in many Southeast Asian recipes, or Sichuan peppercorns for numbing heat. However many types of pepper you use regularly, it’s not so crazy that you’d have a dedicated grinder for each.
Commerce editor Emily Johnson—who credits this Melissa Clark video for indoctrinating her into a multiple grinder lifestyle—has two separate grinders that are kept on different coarseness settings. In testing pepper grinders, we’ve found that many excel at either a fine grind or a coarse one—not both. Emily keeps one pepper grinder set to a finer mill for use for seasoning when she wants the pepper to disappear into a dish, and another for a more coarse, finishing grind for sprinkling on top of salads, making peppery pasta dishes where some texture is welcome, or using tableside. And it allows her to have a variety of grinder aesthetics, too. One pepper grinder is the classic Peugeot design. The other has a simple, more modern look. She can choose which one goes on the table based on the decor vibe she’s going for that particular night.
Any adventurous cook will quickly find that a multiple pepper mill lifestyle is much more useful, and less excessive, than it might seem at first. And now that you’re in the market for a new mill, we’ve included a few eye-catching, test-winning models below that might strike your fancy.