With all the modern kitchen tools we have today, can one still find an almires on the kitchen top? Almires, from the Spanish word almirez or mortar and pestle, is a set of two tools used for crushing or grinding ingredients in preparation for cooking food.
But, do you still have or use the old almires? Is today’s generation know what this simple kitchen tool does? Do they know how to even use it? Bet not anymore.
Almires comes in a variety of makes — stone, marble, wood, brass, lahar, steel, and even hard plastic. It is used to crush garlic, peppercorns, ginger, and many more. It can also be used to crush or grind herbs, small shrimps, and leaves to extract juice.
It is still customary for our ancestors to use this implement to crush betel nuts or nganga. Once crushed, this nganga is chewed by the people of old believing that by doing so makes their breath smelling fresh, teeth clean, and for energy boost.
Patterned by the lowly almires are new innovations of mortar and pestle that make life and cooking easy and fast.