I’ve come to learn, through watching some British, Australian, and NZ YouTube content that the American term “ground beef” confuses you people (you say “minced beef” or, in NZ, just “mince”). Seems like grinding is done to non-organic matter (glass, stone), mincing to organic matter (meat).
Since cannabis is organic, do you grind it or mince it?
I assumed the difference was between hard (ground grain, etc) and soft (minced meat or dried fruit). I could be wrong.
We grind coffee, corn*, spices and nuts, all organic.
It’s meat, fresh herbs and dried fruit that gets minced. Also, sometimes, nuts, because life is never simple.
And that’s because mincing isn’t actually the same as grinding.
Mincing is chopping something very finely, either with knives or a mincer screw, grinding is crushing something, often with a lateral motion and friction.
What happens to minced meat is the former, not the latter.
@Elmer_J.Fudd You’re more-or-less right that soft things lend themselves to mincing, and harder things to grinding, but pesto, sambals and chutneys and chili pastes are often ground. So I think a distinction based on process is more comprehensive.
* meaning cereal grain, not specifically maize.
Oh, realised I forgot to answer this: here in South Africa, cannabis is shredded.
Weed in South Africa:
I grind mine.
I beg to differ, on one of the nerdiest reasons. I am a volunteer miller at Mostert’s Mill in Mowbray, Cape Town.
Before the fire - and shortly when the new stones arrive - the dressing on the mill stones were/will be designed to cut the grains into meal, rather than crushing it like a modern roller mill. Cutting the grain has a few advantages, mostly reducing the heat of the process. Crushed grain is under much more pressure and hence heat, so nutrients are cooked away.
Traditional stone-ground mills are all “chopping” action; at least those with mechanically driven action.
I grant you than manual mills are predicated on crushing.
But we still call it “grinding” in our mill.
I’ve seen that mill, and the water ones in Josephine, Genadendal and Swellendam, in action. I get what you’re saying, the feathering does makes a cutting edge and it’s the up-down motion that breaks up the grain, so it is chopping of a sort. It’ still more of a crushing chopping than the kind of sharp-surface chopping that does mincing. It’s mostly the weight of the runner that does the work, and the gap between it and the bedstone that sets the fineness, not the sharpness or speed of the scissoring action. I’m OK with the ambiguity, and so, I’d say, traditional wind/water mills are somewhere inbetween. But yes, you’re right, I was being to absolutist on the chop/crush dichotomy.
In my earlier cannabis days (late 70’s - early 80’s), we would “shred” or “break up” buds using our fingers and fingernails.
Using a grinder or other device seems relatively recent to me. I grind it, I guess, now that I’ve picked up this habit.
(And to complicate things, what I always call “ground beef” and I know that others call “minced beef” is called “chopped meat” by older Jewish Americans, at least in the Northeast (and some not so older)).