Six Appliances Used Entirely Wrong, Ranked by Whether You Should

Every kitchen appliance was designed by somebody with a clear idea of what it was for. Every one of them has since been used to cook something the design brief never mentioned, usually by a person with a camera and a strong sense that this would be fine.

We have collected six of the most persistent examples and ranked them by the only metric that matters: whether the food is actually good, weighed against how likely you are to void a warranty, an insurance policy or an eyebrow.

Without further ado, from best idea to worst.

1. Dishwasher Salmon

The best known of the lot, and the one that holds up. Wrap a salmon fillet tightly in foil with lemon, dill and a little oil, put the parcel on the top rack, and run a normal hot cycle without detergent. Roughly fifty minutes later you have poached fish.

The reason it works is that a dishwasher on a hot wash sits at a temperature very close to the low, slow, moist environment that expensive water bath cooking is designed to produce. That method has a name and a following, and a long history in professional kitchens. Your dishwasher has been quietly capable of it since the day you bought it.

Verdict: genuinely good fish. Wrap it properly or you will be finding dill in the filter until Christmas.

2. Car Engine Pot Roast

This one has a canon. There is an actual cookbook, first published in 1989, dedicated entirely to cooking on the engine of a moving car, complete with timings expressed in miles rather than minutes.

The technique is exactly as advertised. You wrap food in several layers of heavy foil, wire the parcel securely to a hot part of the engine block, and drive. A pot roast is roughly two hundred and fifty miles. A piece of fish is about sixty. Highway driving cooks more evenly than city driving because the engine temperature holds steady, which is the sort of sentence that tells you these people were serious.

Verdict: the food is real and the method is sound, but modern engine bays are crowded plastic mazes with far fewer safe anchor points than a 1989 sedan. Check your clearances before you commit to a road trip and a lamb shoulder.

3. Iron-Pressed Grilled Cheese

The student classic. Build your sandwich, wrap it in foil, and press it with a clothes iron set to cotton until the cheese gives up.

It works because a sandwich press and a clothes iron are, functionally, the same object with different marketing. Both are a hot flat plate applying steady pressure. The iron is worse at it because the heat comes in a triangle and the soleplate has holes in it, so you get a browning pattern that looks like a hazard sign.

Turn the steam off. Steam and bread produce a damp grey object that will not toast no matter how long you lean on it.

Verdict: a real sandwich, a slightly worse iron, and permanent difficulty explaining the smell of cheddar to anyone who borrows it.

4. Coffee Maker Ramen

Hotel room engineering at its finest. Put the noodles in the carafe, run the machine with plain water, and let the hot water do what hot water does.

Here is the problem nobody mentions in the videos. A filter coffee machine delivers water at around ninety degrees, well below boiling, and it delivers it slowly, a drip at a time. Instant noodles want a hard fast boil. What you get instead is a sad warm bowl of noodles with the texture of a wet paperback, arriving over eight minutes rather than three.

Every hotel coffee maker also carries the accumulated flavour of every pot brewed in it since the last deep clean, and that flavour is now in your dinner.

Verdict: technically food. Use the kettle in the corner that you failed to notice.

5. Dashboard Cookies

A summer news segment that refuses to die. Park in direct sun, put a tray of cookie dough on the dashboard, wait several hours, and film the result for local television.

A closed car in strong sunlight will reach eighty or ninety degrees inside, which is hot enough to melt the butter, spread the dough and eventually set it into something cookie shaped. It is also a long way short of a real oven, so you never get the browning reaction that makes a cookie taste like a cookie. What you get is warm sweet dough with a crust, and a car that smells like a bakery for a fortnight, which is honestly the best part of the whole exercise.

Verdict: the cookies are mediocre and the demonstration is excellent. It exists to show people how hot a parked car gets, and on that count it earns its place.

6. The Sideways Toaster Quesadilla

Turn the toaster on its side, lay a folded cheese tortilla into the slot, and push the lever down.

We are including this because it is everywhere, and we are ranking it last because it is the one entry on this list that can actually set your kitchen on fire. Molten cheese runs straight onto the heating element, where it burns, smokes, and in a decent number of documented cases ignites. Toasters have no thermal cutout designed for a lump of burning dairy sitting directly on the wire.

Fire departments post about this every year. They do not post about the dishwasher.

Verdict: do not. If you want the sandwich, there is a pan two feet away and it has never once required an extinguisher.

What We Learned

The pattern is clear enough once you line them up. The ideas that work are the ones where the appliance already produces the right conditions and simply was not marketed for it, and a dishwasher on a hot cycle is a water bath with a spray arm whether the manufacturer says so or not.

The ideas that fail are the ones where somebody wanted heat and grabbed the nearest object that gets hot, with no thought about how much, how fast, or what happens to the cheese when it lands.

Cook the salmon. Leave the toaster upright.