Food - Drink
The Genius Solution To Your Fresh-Cracked Pepper Measuring Problems
By TALIN VARTANIAN
Freshly-cracked pepper is bold and intense, and while more pepper is always welcome for some eaters, it can overwhelm the balance of flavors in recipes. It's also hard to measure pepper straight from the grinder without black grains getting all over the place, so follow this method to grind just the right amount of pepper.
Epicurious shared a tip from Julia Turshen’s “Small Victories” cookbook that says the best way to measure pepper is to count the number of twists it takes to fill a teaspoon. Hold the grinder over a bowl and do a few twists at a time while keeping count, checking to see if you've ground a teaspoon of pepper until you reach the right amount.
Once you’ve written down how many twists of your grinder equal one teaspoon of pepper, you can also figure out other measurements; for example, if one teaspoon took 50 turns, it would take 150 turns for a tablespoon. This hack doesn’t cut down the actual work of twisting the pepper grinder over and over, but it does cut out the guesswork.