Pestle Mortar vs Blender

Dai_Jiawen_213676

Hi guys, I'm from Singapore. Like most Singaporean, and like any other south-east Asians, I love chilli, So I decided to make my own chilli paste for the first time. I googled for recipes and many of them swear by using pestle mortar over blenders.

The basic steps are to pound the ingredients including chilli, dried chilli, garlic, ginger, galangal, onions, shrimp paste, candle-nuts etc. then fry them with oil until they turn deep red. The people claims that the chilli taste better with pestle mortar compared to when you used a blender. Their reason is that blender blades heats up the ingredients when the blades chop them up.

But in my opinion, if we're going to fry the chilli paste anyway, the heat from the blender doesn't matter? It's not like you're making aioli and the blades will make extra virgin olive oil bitter, or when blending delicate green herbs and the blender may oxidise the herbs too much and they turn a colour brownish green. Another thing is, Singaporeans and Malaysians say "agah agah", not the agar agar seaweed you use to make jelly, but it means estimation in Malay. They cook by instinct, today it's 3 cloves of garlic, tomorrow maybe 4. This may be another reason why recipes taste different!

Has anyone experimented with this? With a controlled experiment and weighted ingredients? What are your thoughts?

Sixten_26971

I feel that the reason they give for preferring a mortar and pestle is totally bogus. Just how much heat is really transferred into your foodstuff, especially if you start with having chilled all your ingredients in the fridge. At the very minimum to have any chance of changing the taste through heat I would say that you need to heat the chili to 50­°C a temperature this low would need to be maintained for quite a while to have any appreciable effect. This is especially true as you intend to fry the chilli paste.

The only reason that I can see that their conclusion may be correct is that a mixer will expose your ingredients to a lot of air and oxygen, which may oxidize your food. Now I don't know if capacin and the other flavors of chili are sensitive to oxidization or what their main process of going bland is so this might not be a problem. Another thing I can think of is that the turbulence may make it easier for volatile compounds to be released and as such have a negative effect on the flavor.

In conclusion their conclusion may be correct but the given argument must be bogus. Also I think slow juicers with a blank attachment should be able to grind your chilies to a paste and slow juicers will not overexpose your products to air or treat them any worse than a mortar and pestle would.