coffee grinder grits

The green and beige stuff on the left is the chicken and mushroom and zucchini and broccoli filling used for arancini down there ↓.

See, the 'popcorn milled in the coffee grinder' experiment had to wait for the arrival of the new coffee grinder. This is what is left of the old coffee grinder.

Poor thing. Autopsy went badly. This old work-horse was originally purchased to grind coffee but then performed double duty grinding spices. Then eventually became devoted exclusively to spices, mostly seeds sometimes breadcrumbs and such. After decades of use, hang on, *counts* yup, decades, I finally accidentally left it too close to a burner and melted the bottom. I thought I could fix it. Hey, I'm a guy, we think we can fix anything. Things were going along rather well until a tiny screw fell off the screwdriver. I imagined it was stuck to a magnet on the motor. I tried to get it. Wouldn't come out. Dug deeper. Tore it apart, and let me tell you, it was a bastard taking apart too. Toughest little machine I ever tore apart. It absolutely would. not. come. apart. I pounded it with a hammer and it wouldn't even crack. The blade wouldn't pop off nor unscrew. The shaft was fixed solidly through the body and would not be removed. I used a dozen tools. Brought out the heavy guns, finally I had to hack-saw the casing in five different places just to get this motor out. The body was in tiny plastic bits, and there was a huge pile of plastic dust by the time I was done. The blades bent upwards, and the tin cup destroyed. But I got the motor. Yay! Anyway, if the new one is built half as good as the old one I'll be quite satisfied. Incidentally, I think I paid $40.00 for the first one, and less than $20.00 for the replacement -- a bargain at twice the cost.

Then I found the tiny screw on the sofa cushion.

So there was that. Here's this.

Conclusion: A coffee grinder can be used to mill popcorn for grits and the result will be a great improvement over pre-milled corn because the oil within the kernels is fresh and every element of the original kernels are in tact with no loss to processing, marketing, or transportation.

The result is uneven granules unless you continued to grind the grain to dust which is not what you want with grits. Stopping soon enough to preserve granules large enough to be considered grits results in a few overly large granules that must be removed and either discarded or re-milled. A sifter with sufficiently large holes would be helpful that would allow the right size granules to pass while holding back larger granules for further processing. I don't have one of those, but I intend to keep an eye out for one.

I do believe this concludes my messing around with popcorn for awhile.