Sometimes to the dismay of my wife, I use a healthy amount of pepper in my cooking (season your food people!). Black pepper, white pepper, pink pepper, you name it. And with the Pepper Cannon, it seems like I’ve may have found a pepper mill that can satisfy my quest for spice.
While the Pepper Cannon isn’t technically a cannon as it doesn’t explosively fire spice out of its shaft, Mann Kitchen claims the Pepper Cannon can produce up to 10 times more ground pepper with a single twist compared to your average pepper mill.
Now I know that might sound like overkill if you just want to add a bit of pep to a salad or a bowl of pasta, but that just means that instead of twisting the Pepper Cannon multiple times, all you need a quarter rotation or less. Where the real time savings come in is when you’re cooking a roast or making a spice rub that calls for multiple tablespoons of pepper, which might otherwise require you spend upwards of five or 10 minutes slowing cranking out the requisite amount of spice, or using a mortar and pestle to grind it all.
By using an adjustable high-carbon stainless steel burr grinder attached to a heavy double-bearing drive shaft, Mann Kitchen claims it can deliver large amounts of consistently ground pepper (or other spices) in seconds. By design, the Pepper Cannon is set up to produce the most pepper when set to a coarse grind, though it can be adjusted to mill finer grains, which will also reduce the total output of the Pepper Cannon.
Meanwhile, the exterior of the Pepper Cannon is made out of a single block of aluminium for maximum durability, with the grinder featuring a 1/2 cup capacity, a 1/3 cup base cup on the bottom, and a cap that can be removed with a single press anytime you need to refill the grinder.
During testing of a prototype Pepper Cannon, Gizmodo EIC John Biggs found that the Pepper Cannon very much lives up to its name and cranks out pepper with almost no effort. The only small flaw with the prototype is that the O-ring on the bottom of the Pepper Cannon is tighter than it should be, which can make removing the base cup somewhat difficult. However, in an email to Gizmodo, Mann Kitchen founder Cleve Oines said the prototype’s bottom O-ring has been fixed for the final build, and with other testimonials from big-name chefs including J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Andrew Rea (of Binging with Babish Fame), the Pepper Cannon already has a few strong early endorsements.
That said, the obvious downside to the Pepper Cannon is that priced at $275 (or $206 for Kickstarter backers), it costs significantly more than a typical pepper mill or even an electric spice grinder which could fill the same role but for much less money.
Additionally, while all Kickstarter campaigns carry the general caveat that your money may just disappear (or at least be refunded down the line), since Mann Kitchen has already successfully completed previous campaigns for its MK9 Chef Knife, there’s much less fear of the company going under before it can ship out products.
At least with the Pepper Cannon having already blown past its $US10,000 ($13,758) goal and hit $US175,000 ($240,765) in less than a week, there should be no shortage of funding.
The Pepper Cannon is available for pre-order right now on Kickstarter, with shipments estimated to being sometime in May 2021.