Are you on the lookout for a new food mill? There’s a new revolution coming, and depending on your philosophy you will either love it or hate it — it’s the healthy eating movement, but to call it that out loud wouldn’t do it justice. Indeed, it’s not just about eating well — it’s also a return to a time where foods weren’t as processed. There is a strong emphasis on cooking from scratch.

Now, as you read this, you might find yourself more and more interested in this revolution, but you’re not sure what tools and resources that you’ll actually need in order to really get the most out of the benefits brought to you by the revolution itself. If you’re in this position, here’s a tool that you have to have: a food mill.

A food mill allows you to speed up the time you spend doing kitchen prep. Once you have a good food mill in your kitchen, you’ll wonder why you never picked up one sooner!

The construction of a food mill can be boiled own to a device that’s built from the ground up for mashing things into smaller pieces. This will truly make preparing food in any kitchen a real breeze, since you don’t have to put a lot of hand power into the movements.

What type of preparation is meant to be handled by a food mill? In a nutshell, anything that needs to be mashed or even pureed down into finer materials. Take homemade tomato sauce — this is something that takes a lot of effort by hand, but with a food mill it’s only matter of minutes before you have smooth tomato sauce. Notice the word smooth there — you aren’t going to have to worry about seeds and other heavy particles ruining the texture of what you want to create.

You will need to make sure that you look for the right size basket sieve. The more fine you want the results, the smaller you actually have to go. For example, if you want to make syrups, you will need to get a food mill that has a basket sieve size of about 1 mm, or 1/32″. That’s small enough to pass things through while still filtering out a great deal.

Some people have had negative experience in the past with food mills. They were happy about the food mill coming to them, but when they used the mill it broke on them. This can be a very frustrating experience, and you might have even seen some reviews reflecting these experiences in the past. However, the reality is that there are ways to prevent your food mill from breaking.

The best thing that you can do is to make sure that you boil or blanch the food that you’re working with before passing it through the food mill. Even though the metal is pretty strong, you will still run the risk of breaking the sieve if you don’t take this step. It doesn’t add that much time to your prep and it will really go a long way in keeping your food mill looking the way it should.