It's been a while since I've written an article on Cooking For Engineers. There are lots of reasons for this including lack of time (or perhaps poor time management) and raising Emma (who is now nearly 3 years old), but I haven't stopped cooking and trying stuff in the kitchen. Many readers have encouraged me to return to writing and not worry so much about preparing an exhaustive article. A few have also suggested that to get back into writing, I could just write about stuff that I use or cook regularly. With that in mind, I've decided to start writing shorter equipment reviews to get back into the rhythm of writing. Then I was faced with the daunting task of picking what to write about first. After some more paralysis, I decided to write about a tool that I don't use that much anymore, but I'm happy to have on hand when I need it: OXO Good Grips Food Mill.

I bought an OXO Good Grips Food Mill several years ago, but never opened the box until after Emma was born. We decided that we'd try to make some of Emma's baby food and running the food through a food processor or blender just didn't give us the soft, fine results that we were looking for. I opened up the food mill and gave it a try and after some experimenting was able to achieve wonderful roasted carrot and pea purrees, fine sweet potato mash, and flavorful applesauce.


The legs of the food mill spread out to about eleven inches which is wide enough to fit a variety of bowls. Better yet, in many cases, I found myself setting the mill over a pot and pressing cooked vegetables through the mill directly into a pot where I would augment with some broth, milk, or cream to continue cooking into a soup or to add some additional flavors to the puree.

The food mill come with three different discs which produce a very fine texture (but takes a lot more effort to press through) or a medium or coarse texture (which I use now for mashed potatoes). Picking the right disc works well for filtering out seeds (coarse worked well for apples - seeds and pieces of skin that I missed when peeling stayed in the food mill and pureed flesh came out into the pot) in addition to controlling the texture. (

Amazon.com is currently selling this food mill for just under $37.50. For me, that price is decent for a tool that produces food textures that can't be easily attained through other techniques. If you plan on making any baby food, then I would upgrade this recommended product to a must have.

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