How To Use A Food Mill (And Do You Need One?)

this rather strange and old-looking Contraption is called a food mill and after watching this video you'll know how it works and whether One belongs in your kitchen hello and welcome to I want to cook my name is Chef Matt and this channel is all about helping you be a better cook no matter your skill level and today we are talking about the humble food mill so what is this thing well first of all if this thing looks like a relic from a bygone era it kind of is these were invented in the 1920s by the fully manufacturing company and this is an old Foley model that I got at the thrift store I think I paid like seven bucks for it but these are still made to this day Miro makes one of these that is very similar to this and there's also a really nice Oxo one the mural model that is similar to this one retails for about forty dollars while the Oxo is a little bit more and of course there are different models that you can buy and while the idea of this thing is about a century old they're still really useful today well what is a food mill you can kind of think of it as a rudimentary food processor in that it takes food in one form and transforms it into another so here's how it works you have this hand crank blade you see here and what happens is you put food into this bin and you crank this blade and what it does is it pushes food through this sieve and then out the bottom you get like a puree or juice now these are mostly used for soft fruits and vegetables and the beautiful thing about it is that you can put them in skins seeds and all you don't have to skin them you don't have to deseed them you just put them in this you crank it and out comes a nice juice or puree all while leaving the skins and seeds behind now this particular model just has one bottom but there are some that you can actually change the bottom so if you want let's say a finer mesh or a more coarse mesh you can do that you just pop a different plate in the Box bottom and that gives you some flexibility for for what you're going to make now as for the blade itself it is held in place by this spring-loaded pin here and then when you're ready to clean it you just unscrew this pin here you pop the blade out and then you can clean it they're kind of a hassle to clean depending on how fine the sieve is but you know soap a scrubber a brush it's really not too bad so basically what this thing is is it's a sieve with like a mechanical Pusher okay so why would you want to use one of these in the modern era where we have food processors we have blenders Etc well again a food processor can definitely do some of the things that this can but what it can't do is the most important part potentially and that is straining so because this has this sieve what happens is you put the food in and as you crank it it pushes that out so even if you made something in a food processor let's say a apples for applesauce you would still have to push them through a sieve so that you get that nice fine consistency along with making homemade applesauce another popular use for these is when making mashed potatoes and to make mashed potatoes what you would do is boil some potato pieces put them in the bottom here crank this and then out would come the nice riced potatoes all while leaving the Skins behind in that way it's similar to the potato ricer that I demonstrated a long time ago that you put the potato pieces into a canister and then you push it and out come that rice potato the benefit of this is that you can work in larger batches those potato ricers aren't very big but this can hold a lot and you can get even bigger versions of this another great use for this is tomatoes you can put whole cooked tomatoes in skins and seeds and all crank this and then you have like a tomato sauce so let me demonstrate this for you so first I'm going to demonstrate with some mashed potatoes I had cut some potatoes and boiled them earlier and as you can see these still have their skin on so what we're going to do is just take these potato pieces we'll put them right into the top of the food mill here another handy feature of these is they have these legs that fit right over the bowl or pot whatever you're using this is the pot that I cooked my potatoes in now I'm just reusing it to Rice these potatoes so we've got our potatoes in now all we have to do is crank and what happens is see it's pushing those potatoes right through the Bottom now you might have to kind of back this up and turn it around but slowly but surely it is ricing these potatoes this is all there is to it you just crank this and then you add more potatoes as you go [Music] [Music] so let me show you the result here of what we have see you have this beautiful nice fluffy potatoes and then from here you know you can add milk and butter and all the good stuff so in this case the food mill made these beautiful mashed potatoes all while leaving the skins in the canister let me clean this out and I'll demo how to make applesauce with this okay we'll do the same thing with apples and I just am using again the same pan that I boiled the apples in and full disclosure this is actually the first time I've used one of these for applesauce so uh let's let's see how it goes we'll just kind of dump these apples in here I just kind of quartered these again I left the seeds the skin and even the stems on now I'm using gala apples for these I think you can also use Macintosh apples those make really good applesauce as well we have a culinary Merry-Go-Round right here [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay I've been cranking for a couple minutes here let me show you the results so as you can see with this we got most of those apples pureed and those Skins are all on the bottom but check this out we have applesauce and from here you know you can flavor it however you want you could add some cinnamon some sugar but we just turned those cooked apples into a nice applesauce puree that is amazing that is the best applesauce I've ever had that's crazy it's like high definition applesauce so that's how one of these food meals work basically soft fruits cooked vegetables you wouldn't want to put something like an uncooked potato in this just like with our potato ricer you know you need to cook them first make them nice and soft so that these can be strained they can be pushed through this sieve now do you need one of these well as with any kitchen tool it obviously depends on your needs case these are really great for making homemade baby food so if you want to make your own purees these are really ideal for this it's kind of a One-Stop shop you cook the food that you're going to make for your baby you'll load it in here crank it and then you have these nice beautiful purees if you're really into canning that's another great use for these again with like jams and things like that with fruit these are really really good and homemade mashed potatoes if you don't want to use another a device like a potato ricer or a mixer this is a good use for this and what's nice about this is It's really simple it doesn't require any electricity although I should note that there are electric Food Mills available but this is about as simple as it gets you know you can take this camping even you don't have to plug it in you just crank it so if your needs or culinary plans fit into some of that criteria then yes one of these could be really useful and honestly they're kind of just cool looking too I mean you could even kind of hang it from a wall and I don't know maybe have some culinary art but let me know do you use one of these and if you do what do you use it for I would love to know I know there's just a lot of different uses for it and I know that some of you are really creative out there so I'd love to hear what you use one of these for too but I hope this little food mill tutorial helped as always thank you for watching thank you for subscribing if you are new to the channel welcome welcome to my kitchen I am so glad that you are here until next time I hope you want to cook now I'm going to get back to that applesauce [Music]

Channel: I Want To Cook

Views: 42,748

Keywords: food mill, how to use food mill, foodmill, how to use foodmill, homemade apple sauce, homemade baby food, tool to make baby food, homemade mashed potatoes, riced potatoes, food mill baby food, food mill potatoes, food mill apple sauce, how to make apple sauce, how to cook apple sauce, apple sauce recipe, what is a food mill, how to work food mill, food mill how to use, foley food mill, foley mill

Id: tX7LGz9769k

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023