Grinding up kitchen scraps?

October 8, 2007 1:06 PM

I want to grind up kitchen scraps such as banana peels, avocado skins and orange peels so they compost faster. I've looked around, and the closest type of grinder I can find is what is called a meat chopper or "meat grinder". Will this work for tough vegetable matter or will it break or jam? Will it take forever?

Or, perhaps there is a better tool for grinding/chopping/mulching kitchen scraps?

posted by kamelhoecker to Home & Garden (10 answers total)

I've never tried meat-grindering banana peels, but if cost and electrical requirements aren't prohibitive, a better mulching tool might be "food waste disposer" (I've always known them as dispose-alls, but I gather that's a GE trademark). If you can find a restaurant-grade one for cheap, you can mulch food waste all night. My partner's father has one plumbed to blow his slurried kitchen waste right out onto the heap.

Obviously you could use a blender, but i've tried that... really, you don't want to have to clean the damned blender every time you pulp leftover veggie bits. Much better something that's not going to have to be food-prep clean after each use, and can be essentially hosed out as needed.
posted by mumkin at 1:19 PM on October 8, 2007

Best answer: I should add that since I don't have a composting waste disposer, sometimes I chop things up with a chef's knife or kitchen shears. Often, though the banana and avocado peels, etc. just go direct to the worm bin, where the red wrigglers can work on them for a nice long time.
posted by mumkin at 1:23 PM on October 8, 2007

Best answer: To answer your specific question, yes, a meat grinder will grind up vegetable matter. I know for a fact that it will grind orange peels, because my family has a favorite recipe that involves using a meatgrinder to chop up whole oranges.

They're easy to clean and they last for approximately a million years.
posted by padraigin at 2:09 PM on October 8, 2007

Bear in mind that the fineness of your grind, especially with high-nitrogen, low-carbon stuff like kitchen waste, will have an effect on how aerobic/anaerobic the resulting compost pile will be. To avoid a slimy, smelly, dense pile, finely ground kitchen scraps will need to be well-mixed with dry high-carbon material: wood (sawdust, even), leaves, straw.
This article is aimed at farm-scale composters, but the same general principles apply, and provides a good overview.
posted by pullayup at 2:45 PM on October 8, 2007

Best answer: I know this doesn't really answer your question directly, and for that I apologise. But have you thought about bokashi composting? It uses bacteria to break down all organic matter (vegetable, meat and fish) really quickly.

Pro's: It's very quick, easy, non smelling and you get a useful liquid product that can be used as plant food or pt down your drains to keep them clean.

Con's: It can be expensive to buy the bran, but it's easy enough to culture your own bacteria and make your own.

Wikipedia article.
posted by Solomon at 3:06 PM on October 8, 2007

Use a knife to rough chop them. Any finer and it hurts the process as pullayup said. Anyway, the knife is fast, won't overdo it and easiest to clean.
posted by caddis at 5:09 PM on October 8, 2007

My mom has started throwing all that kind of stuff in her vitamix blender and then just dumping it straight onto our (admittedly poorly tended) garden. I have no idea what it does for the garden but the blender certainly has no problem with banana peels and other similar fruit and vegetable leftovers. Cleaning didn't seem to be that much of a problem; certainly no harder than regular blender cleaning.
posted by carolr at 5:40 PM on October 8, 2007

Will it blend?

That is the question.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:03 PM on October 8, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the replies. I've taken the plunge and ordered an antique Spong meat grinder. I'm into the hand crank system because, I can keep it outside, doesn't need an electrical outlet or plumbing (like the garburator) and doesn't need to be cleaned up (like a blender). Also, pullayup, thanks for the tip to avoid the "dense pile". I didn't mention this in my original post, but i'm hoping to use worms, and apparently they like to eat the smaller bits, so i'm hoping that's not going to be a problem.
posted by kamelhoecker at 8:09 PM on October 11, 2007

Response by poster: oh and thanks for the bokashi tip. never heard it before!
posted by kamelhoecker at 8:13 PM on October 11, 2007