Soon hotel rooms everywhere will be smelling like fishy coffee thanks to the somewhat new craze of coffee maker cooking. Do you like poached salmon? Short ribs? Grilled cheese sandwiches? Don’t bother heating up the stove top, just prepare it all in your Mr. Coffee. You might raise some eyebrows around the house, but they’ll all be praising your cunning Macguyvery soon enough.
The general idea comes in three forms: steaming, poaching and grilling food using the coffee maker’s basket, pot and burner. Pretty simple actually and it’s likely not some new groundbreaking idea. But the expansion of ideas and interest in gastronomy has allowed folks to experiment with recipes and put their old coffee makers to good use. Try sticking a ham into a Keurig and see what happens. Hot ham water for all!
The coffee maker method of cooking would clearly be popular in dorms and micro-sized New York apartments, but it has a far greater use to those on the front lines according to NPR:
“My nephew came home from Afghanistan complaining about the food in the mess hall,” says Jody Anderson, a retired photographer in southern Oregon. “But the soldiers were allowed only to have coffee makers in their rooms.”
So Anderson started developing recipes for the coffee maker, including ones for mac ‘n’ cheese, short ribs and chicken soup.
Coffee maker mac ‘n’ cheese could be delicious, but I don’t know about short ribs. I also don’t know about cleaning up my coffee maker enough to make food that doesn’t taste like coffee. Still, it beats cooking in your dishwasher.
The folks over at Chow have been putting together some videos to show off preparation methods for all of your daily meals. Boil up some eggs in the pot, create some flavored oatmeal with the help of an herbal tea bag, and make some toast on the burner.
All and all it is a pretty interesting idea and I can’t wait to see Guy Fieri try to use one on “Iron Chef America.” Hopefully he’ll end up clogging it with donkey sauce and jalapeno cheese batter, leading to his exile from the Food Network, similar to the exile scene in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.”
Via Chow / gettyimages