How Your Coffee Maker Can Cook Gourmet Meals In a Pinch

Your coffee maker can do more than brew coffee. Believe it or not, the appliance can whip up meals like breakfast oatmeal, grilled cheese sandwiches and poached salmon dinners in a pinch.

NPR's The Salt reports that a new fad of using coffee makers to cook meals has been surfacing all over the Internet. In addition to brewing, coffee makers can steam food in the basket, poach or boil in the carafe and grill on the burner. Food website Chow produced short videos testing out recipes for tea-infused oatmeal, boiled eggs and an impressive gourmet poached salmon dinner. Even an entire website, a Swedish blog called Kaffekokarkoboken, has been devoted to the unusual cooking method.

Coffee maker cooking may not be useful for those with access to a stovetop, but it opens up a world of culinary possibilities for students living in dorm rooms, deployed soldiers and hotel guests. For example, Jody Anderson, a photographer from southern Oregon, creates and posts coffee pot cooking recipes on her Facebook page as a way for soldiers to enjoy home-cooked meals.

According to her website Cooking With Your Coffee Maker, Joy tested recipes like scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, miniature cakes and even hamburgers and found great results. "Cooking with the coffee maker became a fun and weird science experiment," she writes. Her technique relies on using a lid to hold and raise the temperature even more, and she's been able to fry and bake on a coffee maker by swapping out the carafe for a sierra cup and lid.

Check out the video playlist above to find out what dishes Jody Anderson has cooked up with her coffee maker.