Of Course Martha Stewart Makes Scrambled Eggs In A Cappuccino Machine
Using a coffee machine as a makeshift stove isn't an unheard-of practice. If you're in a hotel room that doesn't have a kitchenette, or a college dorm that doesn't allow hot plates, having a coffee machine on hand can be a great help. Though it's technically made for brewing coffee, without the grinds, it still produces boiling water. That means you can cook things like ramen noodles and instant mac and cheese, or even an entire three-course meal (via Tasty) if you're willing to put in a little extra effort.
Someone like Gordon Ramsay, who openly criticized the idea of cooking steak in a toaster, would likely be against using a coffee maker for anything other than its intended purpose — at least we are assuming so. As for Martha Stewart? Well, the celebrity chef isn't the traditionalist you might think she is, because she casually revealed to Food Network in 2018 (via Facebook) that she often makes scrambled eggs in a cappuccino machine.
How does Martha Stewart make scrambled eggs in a cappuccino machine?
A cappuccino machine, unlike a regular coffee maker, does more than just run boiling water through coffee grinds. It also has an attached nozzle that spews out steam, Perfect Daily Grind explains. This nozzle, called a steam wand, is designed for frothing the milk that goes in an espresso, turning it into a cappuccino. Heating up the coffee pot is the only way to use a regular coffee maker as a cooking vessel, but since she has a cappuccino machine, Martha Stewart takes advantage of the steam wand.
As she demonstrated in the viral video (via Facebook), she cracks two eggs into a mug and whisks them together with a fork before adding salt, pepper, and butter. Stewart then inserts the steam wand, slowly moves the mug around so the steam hits all the eggs, and in just seconds they're done cooking. "It steams the eggs into the softest, fluffiest scrambled eggs," she raved in the Food Network clip.
This method has been around long before Martha Stewart started doing it
While Martha Stewart may have been the first to make the technique go viral on social media, she wasn't the one who came up with the idea of cooking eggs with a cappuccino maker. Shortly after the video was posted, the Martha Stewart website clarified that it was restaurant chef Jody Williams who introduced Stewart to the steam wand method in an old episode of the Martha Stewart show. She apparently has been making it ever since.
Stewart and Williams both refer to the results as scrambled eggs, but according to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (via YouTube), they're actually called huevos al vapor, which translates to steamed eggs in Spanish. The Colombian coffee shop Lopez-Alt visited, Café El Polo, invented the regional specialty in 1955, Nomadic Niko shares, but these days you can get huevos al vapor at any neighboring cafe. If you want a taste of the original recipe you'll have to go to Salamina, Colombia to do so, but otherwise, it's easy to make it at home with your own cappuccino machine.