Yes! In many cases, a food mill is better than a food processor and if you are a serious cook, you’ll wonder why anyone ever thought a food processor was a replacement for it. Essentially, a food mill is like a sieve combined with a blade to push foods through. But, unlike a food processor, it won’t whip up foods and put air into them and, depending on the plate you fit, will leave hard stuff like skins and seeds behind. A food processor can’t do that. To make certain smooth purees, the only other way to do this would be to painstakingly force the food through a wire sieve until your hand aches, and then keep doing it until your arms fall off.
A food mill can help you make smooth sauces, dips, mashed potatoes or other roots, jellies, jams, soups like gazpacho, and baby food. And, a food mill is the easiest and most efficient way to make apple sauce since everything, peels, cores, stems, and seeds, can go right into the food mill using a coarse (large holes) disk. No peeling or coring is necessary!
If you want to use fresh tomatoes to make a smooth tomato sauce with no peels, you can use a food mill for this, too. And it’s particularly convenient for whole canned tomatoes. You can dump in the whole can, turn the crank, and force only the tomato pulp through with no seeds.
I mentioned mashed potatoes. You can dump all the cooked potatoes into the food mill on top of a dish with larger holes (a “coarse” disk) and just turn the crank to produce smooth mashed potatoes that are not overworked and pasty. If you need to make a truly smooth pureed soup, you’d use a fine disk.
What Is a Food Mill?
A food mill is a round “pot” without a bottom in which a perforated plate sits. Food mills will come with plates with different-sized holes, fine, medium, and coarse, to choose depending on what you are milling. On top sits a handled blade that runs around on top of the plate, forcing smooth food through the holes and leaving behind the stuff that is too large or solid to go through. This makes the food mill a super convenient way to create smooth sauces or purees while leaving behind the stuff you don’t want.
How to Use a Food Mill
I’ve already kind of explained how a food mill works. You place the food mill pot on top of a bowl large enough to catch all the food you need to catch. Make sure the bowl is sturdy and will not move around or topple over easily. Metal bowls or glass bowls are better than plastic bowls for this.
After putting the food into the mill, you turn the crank clockwise to push the food through. If the food gets bound up to one side, you can turn the crank the opposite way to distribute it again. Keep cranking until all the food is processed and only the solid parts you don’t want are left behind if any exist. Periodically, you may want to lift up the food mill to scrape off pureed food from the bottom. I’d use a silicone spatula for this.
To do the same thing without a food mill, you’d need to process the food in a food processor or blender first and then force the food through a fine mesh sieve. It’s not easy!
- Remove skins and seeds with minimal effort.
- High quality durable stainless steel construction.
- Side hooks to secure to bowls.
- 3 Disks included, fine, medium, and coarse.
- Recipe E-book Included!
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Limits of a Food Mill
A food mill will not catch everything. The plates are round metal disks with holes. This is not the same as a fine strainer. So, it is not going to turn out anything ultrasmooth and silky, For that, you’d still need a mesh strainer and/or a chinois strainer.
A chinois strainer is like a regular mesh strainer except in a cone shape with a sturdy cage around it. They are meant for producing very smooth custards, broths, sauces, and jelly. Chinois strainers sometimes come with their own stands so they can be fit over bowls and may also come with an appropriately sized pestle with a long handle to push food through with. You may have heard chefs refer to this tool as a “China cap.”
The advantage here is that the food is funneled down to a point making it easier to strain it through efficiently. When using a rounded strainer, the food goes every which way as you are mashing it. The funneled cone shape lets you push the food mostly straight down. Again, compared to a food mill, this is still labor-intensive. A food mill does both the mashing and straining for you with just a turn of the handle. With a chinois, you have to do all the mashing and straining yourself.
Sometimes, depending on the food, it may be easier to start with a regular strainer and then put strain the food a second time with a chinois. Sometimes, for less smooth chunky soups, sauces, etc. a chinois used alone is just too much work or will barely work at all.
A Vintage Tool That Still Works
I’ve noticed that in internet foodie spaces, the food mill seems to be frowned upon while the chinois is over-hyped. It’s best to choose the appropriate tool for what you want to accomplish, and not listen to folks who want to sound like chefs. Probably because they’ve seen TV chefs trying to push things through a chinois for hours, the food mill is seen as an old-fashioned home cook gadget while the “chinois” is seen as a chefy tool.
This causes many to overemphasize the use of a chinois for situations they are not meant for. A China cap is meant for situations where the mixture is somewhat smooth and large particles are already gone, or processed down, and only fine particles are left. Then, you would use the chinois to filter out even the finer particles for a result that is ultra smooth. So, for something that starts with large pieces, skins, seeds, etc. there is usually another step involved such as processing the food in a food processor or blender to produce a smoother mixture with finer particles that can be passed through the mesh. Otherwise, the chinois or regular mesh strainer will clog up quite quickly. When people say otherwise, I feel like they have never tried it.
It is of course possible to combine a food mill as a first step to get out the larger particles, skins, chunks, etc., and then use other steps to produce a smoother consistency as needed. For example, for making tomato soup, once you have eliminated the skins and seeds from tomatoes, if you need an even smoother sauce, after cooking, a blender alone may produce the results you want, with no need for a mesh strainer or chinois. If not, a chinois could be used to produce a super smooth tomato soup.
Don’t be confused by folks who tell you to use a chinois for super thick mixtures like pates or pastes. A regular mesh strainer or tamis sieve (drum sieve) would work better, although none of this is without some elbow grease involved. The rounded bowl shape of a regular mesh strainer makes it hard to work with when the mixture is thick. A drum sieve or “tamis” is a flat wire mesh sieve fit on a round “drum.” You use a scraper to push foods through the flat mesh at the bottom. Today, these are more often used to sift flour and other dry ingredients.
