Sustainable Substitutions is a new feature devoted to making small changes in the kitchen to make pie-making more sustainable environmentally, economically and/or enjoyably.
First up: Coffee Grinders. There are pie recipes that call for coffee grounds, and, more importantly, pie making often keeps your pie-maker up late. Fresh ground coffee is enormously better than vacuum-sealed ground, and with this substitution we can extract the full flavor.
The antique grinder on the left was your pie maker's original device, until the frequently small repairs and ~1NPR Morning Edition story's worth of grinding time convinced him to go electric.
Two broken electric grinders later, it became obvious that electric grinding is not a sustainable solution. It turns out to be impossible to repair even a simple malfunction like the inevitable failure of the bushing that held the blade in place. So for want of a $0.10 part, roughly 1kg (2.3lb) of plastic, steel and copper is rendered useless.
The wood, brass and steel manually cranked version is very repairable. Both of those screws are probably replacements, and the entire unit can be dissembled with a simple toolkit. Some replacement parts will probably require custom machining, but nothing on it is so complicated a good art school won't have the right equipment. Additionally, because the distance between the grinding wheel and the wall can be set manually, it's possible to select exactly the size of the average granual. Your pie maker uses this to make a very fine powder for Austrian-style coffee, or a courser grind appropriate for a big mug from a French press.
An added bonus is that "grinding" is exactly what your pie maker does in his favorite non-baking hobby.
