The Ninja Pulse Blender - Coffee Grinder Extraordinaire

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 9:31 pm  

The Ninja Pulse – Blender & Coffee Grinder

By Marie James

The 16oz blender cup, ready to go

The day my Ninja Pulse arrived, I packed away several other small kitchen appliances.

One of them was my little coffee grinder.

I’d no longer need it, since the Ninja Pulse will grind coffee for me.

When the time came to grind coffee, I wasn’t sure which container and blade to use… so I tried both.

Note: I used the same amount of coffee beans from the same bag so the results would give me a good comparison.

Grinding the Coffee in my Ninja Pulse

Using the Personal Size Blender Cup

First I used the individual 16-oz. container and its blade. I filled the cup to the marked fill line, put the cup on the base, and pulsed away. Immediately I could see coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup near the blade assembly.

But I didn’t see much else happening and wasn’t sure if the rest of the beans would get ground up. (Too many other blenders of the past in the back of my mind.)

But I kept pulsing, and soon I noticed that the beans were rising up on the outer edge of the cup and then falling into the center of the cup. They were “whooshed” down into a funnel shaped opening and carried down to the blade. Very soon I had a container full of finely ground coffee.

Success!

After inhaling the aroma for a few seconds–don’t you love the smell of freshly ground coffee?—I poured the ground coffee into my coffee canister.

Most of it fell out, but there were some lumps—I thought. But they were just clumps of ground coffee. In fact there was not a chunk of coffee bean in sight.

The 40oz blender pitcher with coffee beans all ready to grind

Grinding Coffee with the 40oz Ninja Pulse Pitcher

I refilled the 16-oz. container with the same amount of coffee beans and poured them into the 40-oz. Pulse container. I’d already put the tiered blade assembly in. Let the pulsing begin!

After a while I could see that the coffee was not grinding quite as finely as it had in the smaller container. At least not as quickly.

I kept on pulsing long enough to decide that the large container and its blade would probably not grind as finely as the other small container had.

Comparing the Textures of Ninja Blender Ground Coffee

The coffee from the 40-oz. container was definitely coarser.

Still, it looked like coffee I’d purchased already ground. Sure enough, a side-by-side comparison showed me that the second batch was what the coffee manufacturers might call coarse grind, while the first batch in the 16-oz. container would probably be called fine.

When I decanted the ground coffee into the canister—after smelling it for a while, of course–there was actually finely ground coffee stuck in the bottom of the container. It was easily removed with a rubber scraper and incorporated into the canister grounds.

Ninja Pulse Blender Grinds Coffee, Fine or Coarse – A Visual Comparison

Finely ground coffee using the 16oz individual cup

Coarsely ground coffee using the 40oz blending pitcher

Using the Ninja Pulse as a Coffee Grinder – My Conclusions

• Both methods work quickly, grinding the coffee beans completely, without leaving any chunks of bean.
• I’ll probably use the small container for grinding coffee for my drip coffee maker. I prefer the finer texture.
• If I needed a coarser grind for a percolator or other type of coffee maker, the large container and its blade would actually be a better choice. The small container and blade ground the coffee finely so quickly that I think it would be hard to get coarse ground coffee that way.
• Sometimes I mix ground coffees together to incorporate a flavored coffee into plain coffee or blend espresso into regular coffee. The large container is great for that. It doesn’t grind the coffee any finer, but it does a super job of blending the varieties together.
• This definitely worked well enough I won’t be needing to pull out my little coffee grinder again.  Yet another reason why the Ninja Pulse blender is the ultimate multi-tasker (Click here to read my more comprehensive review of the Ninja Pulse).
• Oh—and did I mention that both methods result in a feast for the ole sniffer? Mmm!

P.S. – Stay tuned for next week’s post – Bethany will be going over how to make cold brewed coffee using coffee that was ground in the Ninja 1100 Kitchen System.

Filed under: Ninja Blender

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!