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Welcome to The Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
If you do any amount of cooking, you know there are two ingredients that go in nearly every dish: salt and pepper. For easy salt access, all you need is a simple, elegant salt cellar—you can find a favorite of ours on sale at Crate and Barrel. But for pepper, you’re faced with fresh-cracked options. You could go electric, but so many of them break easily. You could do what I was doing, which was buying pepper in the mill from Sam’s Club. Oh, that also broke on me. So yeah, when it comes down to it, what you need is an old-fashioned pepper grinder.
Surprisingly, it’s not so easy to find a great one that’s easy to use, smooth, and holds a lot of peppercorns. It turns out the heavy duty pepper grinder I needed was the one everyone was talking about already. For $200, the Mannkitchen Pepper Cannon is the best pepper grinder I’ve ever used, and the last one I’ll ever need.
It grinds smoothly, every time.
From the word go, Mannkitchen has made the process as easy as possible. This black obelisk is not nearly as intimidating as it appears. The spinning lid of the Pepper Cannon opens up with a pop when you press the top button. The bifurcated cylinder inside stores half a cup of peppercorns, enough for a month’s worth of dinner parties at least. Changing the grind settings from fine to coarse is easier than other grinders I’ve used. After weeks of use, it doesn’t get stuck or caught up on peppercorns ever. In fact, I feel like it grinds smoother now than it did when I started using it. Once you’ve done the initial work of breaking it in, the cannon will be your new right-hand in the kitchen.
I love grinding pepper with this mill so much that I’m often disappointed when I have to stop, lest the balance of my stew be off. Smoothness is one thing, but the Pepper Grinder also allows for precision. The flow of pepper stops when I stop spinning the grinding top and not a moment later.
The base cup is the hero.
Attached to the base of the grinder—the end where the pepper comes out—is a cup that fits snuggly and helps the pepper cannon stand supported without pepper shavings getting all over your counter. As a messy home cook, this is a touch I truly appreciate. It doesn’t just keep the excess pepper from getting all over my counter, it stores it the same way a salt cellar holds salt.
If you want, you can grind pepper with the base cup attached. Do the work in advance and grind yourself a cup full of pepper to season as you go, without the frequent need to pick the cannon up and put it down again. Not that it’s that heavy. The point is, you have options.
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It looks great in my kitchen.
The until-now-unspoken reason I think the Pepper Cannon is worth $200, aside from all the technical stuff, is that it looks fucking great in my kitchen. We, as a culture, need to get back to being willing to spend more money for beautiful objects. This thing’s black obelisk shape is beautiful in a functional, Brutalist way. Black goes with everything and when it comes to kitchen tools, white isn’t really an option. It doesn’t require any special maintenance or upkeep, just keep it wiped down and the aerospace grade aluminum will keep its luxurious sheen.
The other reason the it’s worth the, let’s call it bold, price tag is that it’s built to last. I’ve been using it in every meal I cook, every week, multiple days a week, every time I cook. I expect to continue doing that for decades. If you think about it that way, $200 is worth it for this kind of kitchen upgrade. I know the Mannkitchen Pepper Cannon can go the distance.
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Photographs by Joe Lingeman. Prop styling by Heather Greene.
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