Take a look around your kitchen. How many gadgets, appliances and tools do you have in there? Probably the basics at least: blender, toaster, frying pan, baking pans, Keurig, etc. But Katja Wulff from Sweden shows us in her blog that the only appliance you really need is a coffee maker. She’s made everything from the normal (scrambled eggs) to the weird (testicle tacos). Yeah you read that right.
In Wulff’s interview with The Atlantic, she says that cooking with her coffee maker is now more of a hobby, but while she was in college, she cooked solely with her coffee maker for six whole months. Fellow college students will understand her struggle, because buying state-of-the-art kitchen appliances isn’t feasible for most of us. After all, ramen, macaroni and cheese and the infamous “iron grilled cheese” have become typical college staples. Apart from necessity, Wulff enjoys the challenge and creativity that cooking with a coffee maker provides. And, her creativity isn’t limited to coffee makers. Wulff has experimented with many other gadgets, including vacuum cleaners, hair curlers, dishwashers, hair crimpers and even her parents’ washing machine. Thankfully, her parents prevented that from happening, forbidding her from cooking with anything other than a stove while she was under their roof. According to Wulff though, “nothing is as good or as versatile as the coffee maker.”
How does she do it?
Katja uses two main parts of her coffee maker to cook to the food—the carafe (the glass pot that holds the coffee) and the heater (the metal part the carafe rests on). The carafe can be used to cook rice or soup by placing the main ingredients in the carafe and water in the brewer. It can also be used to “carafe-fry” eggs by merely heating oil in the carafe, adding eggs and stirring occasionally. The heater is used mainly for frying purposes. Katja cooks mostly meats on it, like bacon and sausages, but it can also be used to toast bread by frying it on both sides. But there’s more—Katja has also cooked seafood in a coffee maker by placing mussels in the filter holder. For those of us that can’t properly cook seafood using typical kitchen appliances (me), that is an impressive feat indeed.
But is this reasonable?
Unfortunately, no, not really.
Wulff said it takes her anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes to cook bacon. That’s a long time to wait for a food that smells so delicious when cooking. She knows this though, and it’s not her point to cook the best looking or most efficiently made food. It’s merely something she’s interested in. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the best hobbies are the weirdest ones. So kudos to you, Katja Wulff.