so you're cooking rice, and you need to grind achiote (annatto seeds)

to make your rice have that nice amarillo color and flavor. How do you grind the seeds?

I've been putting the little red annatto seeds into a cheap pepper grinder, and they destroyed the grinder's ceramic burr because they are so tough.

How do you deal with that stubborn achiote?

Seems like that would be your best bet.

but one is wood and the other is ceramic. THey can crack brittle things like peppercorns and break woody things like clove stems well enough, but I think I'd need to catch the annatto seeds between a hammer and steel plate to crack them. Flat surfaces would be needed to keep the seeds from scooting away from the impact. The wooden mortar won't work of course since the seeds are at least as hard as the wood, and my ceramic mortar doesn't allow for hammering (not this hard anyway).
I can make headway with the ceramic mortar but it's slow. There's a lot more mangling than crushing or cracking of the seeds so that much of the red color on the outside of the annatto ends up streaked on the mortar itself.

sure it's expensive, but it's worth it.

You could try one of those mini-espresso grinders....

that I use just for grinding spices. It works great.

Annatto seed is much harder and denser than any roasted coffee, though. It's more like an unroasted coffee bean. I'm thinking maybe a second hand manual coffee mill with steel burrs would handle it, and hopefully not cost too much.

In fact, I'm going to go right now and see if it will grind annatto seeds, because, amazingly enough, I happen to have some.

Okay - my little Procter-Silex grinder powdered those little puppies up in about 8 seconds.

I don't drink coffee, but my coffee grinder is one of my favorite kitchen tools.

Gives both an interesting flavor sometimes.
;-)

...I think it would taste pretty weird in coffee. It'd be okay if it was just sweet spices like cinnamon and cloves maybe, but I'm always throwing in peppercorns and cumin and coriander seeds, too, among other things. Maybe I should try it sometime for the experience. :crazy:

Not necessarily good ones.
Cominos flavored coffee isn't that great.

so now I have one dedicated for spices, one for coffee

good luck!