Is a $200 Pepper Grinder a Better Pepper Grinder?

By Noah Kaufman

All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

I’ll date myself here, but I’m of an age that, when I saw Dana Carvey and Adam Sandler's sensual pepper grinding on SNL at 11 years old, I thought it was one of the great pieces of television comedy. And more broadly, freshly ground pepper to a young Noah was a sign of sophistication in a restaurant or in someone's home; for most of my childhood we just had the ground stuff. But I’m closing in on three decades since watching that Saturday Night Live sketch for the first time, and I’ve long since come around to the idea that freshly ground pepper is a staple, not an extravagance.

Recently, though, a new class of pepper mills has emerged that brings the idea of luxury back to pepper grinding. Both the Männkitchen Pepper Cannon and the Black Rain pepper mill cost $200 (the Black Rain is currently $50 off), and I have to say, when I first saw that I could spend $200 on something that costs $6 at the grocery store, I was skeptical—especially since these were not necessarily dinner table showpieces. The Pepper Cannon is sleek but unlikely to match anything else you own, and the Black Rain looks like a pretty standard electric pepper mill. But after using both of them for several months, I can tell you that they are entirely different pieces of equipment than a grocery store pepper grinder, or even than a nice mill like the Peppermate, which won our initial round of product testing several years ago.

For those of you still dubious of the price of these grinders, which I grant is enough to make you question whether pepper could be that important in your life after all, the best comparison point I could draw is to the beloved-by-Epi Vitamix blenders. They cost three or four times what other "good" blenders do, but it doesn't actually make much sense to compare those much cheaper "good blenders" because a Vitamix is so much more powerful it is capable of things they just aren't. The biggest difference between a $200 pepper mill and every other pepper grinder you’ve ever tried is the sheer quantity of ground pepper that shoots out the bottom—and shooting really is the right verb here. It's called the Pepper Cannon for a reason, and the Black Rain can create a pepper typhoon. But do you need that much pepper? I’d say in some scenarios, you absolutely do. These pepper mills aren't really for adding a sprinkle of pepper to a single bowl of soup or pasta—you want a pretty light touch for that—they’re for properly seasoning entire dishes. Think about how much salt and pepper you need to add to a whole chicken to roast, or to a pork shoulder before you braise it. These dishes can require tablespoons of pepper, which, I can tell you from experience, is cumbersome to get out of most hand-cranked pepper mills. With the Black Rain or Pepper Cannon, you can get that much pepper in seconds.

Though they cost about the same amount, the Black Rain and Pepper Cannon are also quite different from each other. The Pepper Cannon is essentially a sleek-looking, souped-up manual pepper grinder. It's designed to be more powerful, though, expelling more pepper with every twist. The Black Rain is a button-operated, high-torque, battery-powered grinder that you can use with one hand.

The other thing these grinders do better than less expensive versions is adjust from coarse to fine grinding. Both have easy-to-move dials and can go from big pieces of cracked pepper to the kind that's so finely ground it vanishes into a sauce almost instantly. The Black Rain offers only five (quite varied) settings, compared to dozens on the Pepper Cannon, but both of these high-end pepper grinders provide all the range you’re likely to need.

So, is one of these pepper mills worth it? It's kind of like asking if a Ferrari is "worth it." You’ll get where you’re going in a Toyota, but you can get there faster in a Ferrari—and you might have more fun.