Grinding Spices: Electric spice grinder

The ability of electric coffee grinders to grind hard coffee beans also makes them ideally suited for grinding a wide range of spices, such as dried bay leaves, cumin seeds, cloves, and broken-up cinnamon sticks. They can grind from as little as a teaspoon of spice to as much as half a cup, and they can produce both fine and coarse grinds. It is not necessary to clean the grinder after each spice. And if a recipe calls for multiple spices to go into a curry at the same time, you can certainly plunk them all in and grind them together. (However, I often encourage my students to grind spices individually so they can see for themselves how different each spice smells before and after grinding. Over time, you should be able to identify a spice by smell alone.) If you do want to clean the grinder, wipe the inside with a slightly damp paper towel, taking extra care to clean underneath the metal blades. The blades are sharp, so be careful not to cut yourself (and unplug the grinder before you start to clean it!). Another way to eliminate any spice residue is to grind dried bread cubes in the grinder. This not only cleans out the grinder but also provides flavored breadcrumbs that you can use to coat fish, meat, and poultry.