Japanese Ceramic Mortar MINI SURIBACHI Set, GOMASURIKUN,Made in Japan

It’s a little smaller than I expected (I should have read the description more carefully), but for small quantities it works great! A tablespoon of material pretty much is all you can grind without slopping the contents over the side of the bowl. However, if you just want to grind a little bit of sesame seeds, etc., this little bowl works wonderfully.Don’t try to use it like a Western mortar and pestle, where you pound things with the pestle - you want to use the pestle to rub things against the ridges in the bowl. This works well with fresh ingredients and softer dried ingredients, like sesame seeds, fennel, cumin, dried leaves like oregano and basil, but may not be ideal for harder things like peppercorns or salt.Anyway, if you use it for the types of stuff that is was designed for, and for the small quantities that fit, it works great!

it's small,,,like at a japanese restaurant small. ie, what do you want to do, use enough sesame for a meal or get a bowl big enough to feed an army for a week. i want my sesame fresh one meal at a time, so this is perfect!!!!!!!!

This is a perfectly functional set and if it had either arrived as pictured or pictured, I'd have given it 5 stars. However, the surikogi, or pestle is a standard "blank" type wooden cylinder, and not the rustic, hand-carved looking one as illustrated in the store. I bought this set thinking it was a traditional type that would add flavor to my food as per the variety of wood that is used in an authentic set, but this is not. I have chosen to keep the set and look for a better surikogi elsewhere, but I consider this photograph used in this description to be misleading, and therefore not honest business practice. I would have purchased a different suribachi set if I had known that they would substitute an inferior surikogi for the authentic type shown in the photo.

The product description says this item is 7.3 x 4.8 x 2 inches. What we received is barely 3.5 inches wide. NOWHERE NEAR 7.3 INCHES. Not even half that big.

Smaller than expected, I should have read the measurement...