I have a perfectly respectable modern kitchen. I have electricity. I have a blender. I have various other appliances designed to make food preparation faster, easier and considerably less physical. I can press a button and have something chopped, blended, pulverized or otherwise transformed into something edible.
And yet I own a molcajete y tejolote. For anyone unfamiliar with the terminology, the molcajete is the traditional Mexican stone mortar and the tejolote is the stone pestle that goes with it. Mine is essentially a bowl and a club made from granite, an intrusive igneous rock that forms from the slow cooling of magma deep within the Earth. This is apparently what passes for kitchen technology in my house.
The first thing you notice about a molcajete is that it isn’t particularly interested in being convenient. It is heavy. Not “a little heavier than a ceramic bowl” heavy. It is why did I put this thing so far away from the counter heavy. You don’t casually move a molcajete around the kitchen. You make a decision to move it.
The second thing you notice is that using it requires actual physical effort. This seems like a strange concept today. I can make salsa in a blender in about thirty seconds. I can put ingredients into a food processor and let an electric motor do all the work. I can accomplish in less time than it takes me to find the tejolote what previous generations accomplished by grinding things against a rough piece of volcanic stone. And yet there is something satisfying about doing it the old-fashioned way.
When I make salsa in the molcajete, I don’t simply throw everything in and hit a button. I grind the garlic. I work in the chiles. I crush the tomatoes. I add the ingredients gradually and watch the texture develop. It is slower. It is messier. It is also considerably more fun.
One of the things I like about the molcajete is that it doesn’t make everything uniformly smooth. A blender has one basic philosophy: Everything must become smaller. The molcajete has a more nuanced approach. Some things get crushed. Some get mashed. Some remain recognizable. The result has texture. And because you’re doing the grinding yourself, you can stop when it looks right instead of waiting for a machine to decide that your salsa has reached the consistency of baby food.
Of course, there is another side to this. There are times when I’m standing in the kitchen grinding something with the tejolote and I can’t help wondering why I’m doing this to myself. I own a blender. The blender is sitting right there. It has never once complained about having to make salsa. The blender would finish the job before I had even developed a respectable rhythm with the tejolote. This is the sort of moment when tradition and convenience have a little argument in my kitchen. Convenience usually wins. But not always.
The molcajete is particularly good when I’m making something in a relatively small quantity. Garlic, chiles, herbs, spices, salsa or guacamole are all excellent candidates. I can crush things to exactly the texture I want, and there is something about the rough stone surface that makes the process feel more substantial than pushing a button on an appliance.
Guacamole may be the best example. I can make perfectly acceptable guacamole with a fork. I can make it with a potato masher. I can make it in a food processor, although that seems unnecessarily aggressive. But making it in a molcajete feels right. The avocado gets mashed while still retaining some texture, and whatever else I’ve added gets incorporated into it rather than disappearing completely. The result looks and feels like something I actually made rather than something that came out of a machine.
Then there is the appearance of the thing. A molcajete sitting on a kitchen counter has a certain presence. It looks like it has been there for a very long time, even if I haven’t owned it nearly that long. It looks useful. It looks primitive. It looks vaguely intimidating. It also looks considerably more interesting than a blender.
And perhaps that is part of the attraction for me. I’ve always been interested in things that have a history. Photography, old cameras, mechanical objects, traditional tools—there is something appealing about an object that doesn’t need to be plugged in and hasn’t been designed to become obsolete in three years. The molcajete is about as far removed from planned obsolescence as you can get. There is no software update coming for it. There isn’t going to be a Molcajete Pro Max next year with artificial intelligence built into the tejolote. There isn’t even an owner’s manual. It’s a rock. You grind things with it. That’s pretty much the entire operating system.
There are disadvantages, of course. Cleaning it is more work than rinsing out a blender. A new molcajete needs to be properly prepared before you use it, and the rough stone surface requires a little care. Its weight means that you don’t casually toss it into the sink. And if you’re making a large quantity of anything, the blender will win the efficiency contest by a humiliating margin.
But I’ve come to realize that efficiency isn’t always the reason I cook. Sometimes I cook because I want to make something. And sometimes I use the molcajete because I want to experience the process of making it. That’s probably the best argument I can make for owning one in a modern kitchen. I don’t need it. I have other tools that can do most of the same jobs faster. But there is something satisfying about taking a few ingredients, putting them into a piece of granite rock and slowly turning them into something I want to eat. It makes cooking feel less like an assembly line and more like an activity.
Besides, I’ve already gone this far. I own the thing. It weighs approximately as much as a small appliance. It has occupied valuable counter space. I’ve learned how to use it. At this point, I might as well admit the truth: I like my molcajete. I like the weight of it. I like the texture it produces. I like the fact that it doesn’t plug in. And I especially like the fact that every once in a while I can stand in my modern kitchen, surrounded by appliances designed to save me time, and deliberately choose the one that makes everything take longer. There may be no practical reason for me to do it. But then again, practicality has never been the only reason to have a kitchen full of things.