And Another Thing...
The brave little toaster and the coffee pot that drools

By Skip Ploss
First Published in "The Home Monthly" October 2004 Issue for the Hersam Acorn Press

I am an understanding kind of a guy. Really. I understand that a refrigerator has but 10 or 15 years to give and I can accept that. Ours quit last week and was replaced by (no, we did not get the one with the digital camera) a nice GE freezer over fridge unit with an ice maker. Which is fine. But the failure of this centerpiece of the kitchen brought to mind the failure or glaring inadequacies of several other kitchen devices.

As I have stated here before, I am the latest in a long line of gadget crazies. My father was one. I remember back in 1969 making a trip to the Kress Department Store in Los Alamitos, California, so that we could be the first on St. Albans drive with a cassette player. The large Panasonic unit was about the size of a standard computer tower these days, not counting the speakers. It had the cassette player and AM/FM stereo radio.

To get the family to accept the new technology we each got a cassette... one. My brother got the soundtrack to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and I, who had just turned nine, got The Best of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which of course is exactly the music every 9-year-old boy wanted in 1969. In the cooking arena we had a Cossacque, which was a barbecue made entirely from the nose-cone glass used by NASA.

My gadget lust tends to land in two distinct areas these days, physically small computers and designer cookware/small appliances. Today we will address the later.

Ever since I got into cooking back in the mid eighties, and as a consequence big and tall shops shortly thereafter, I have lusted after various kitchen accoutrements (I pronounce it the French way, a-koo-tray-mau, it sounds cooler). These have included the spectacularly heavy porcelain and cast-iron Le Creuset cookware to the classic standing mixer of KitchenAid, which cost approximately the same as the GNP of many South American countries. I have done all right, mind you. I have my two Cuisinarts, a drawer full of OXO Goodgrips, a good set of knives, an ice crushing blender, a deep fryer and a stick mixer. All of which still function magnificently.

It is in the counter-top breakfast-time appliance area where I seem to have angered the gods.

I have had four toasters in as many years. The first of the dead-toasters was an anonymous four-slot unit purchased from a store like Washcloths ’n’ What Have You, or Lounge, Loofah and Leave. It may have even been a wedding present. It was a decent toaster. Handled rye, white, bagels and frozen waffles like a champ until it up and quit one day.

My wife, it seems, was secretly pining for a toaster-oven at the time of its demise and so the search began. One small issue, I don’t like toaster ovens – they are not ovens and they don’t seem to toast particularly well. I became depressed. I remained so until one day a new catalog came in the mail and there, on the cover, seemingly radiating shafts of golden sunlight while choirs of angels were singing “Ah, Ah,” was a sexy Italian convertible, the DeLonghi Convertible Toaster/Toaster Oven. This was the answer! Finally a toaster that could do both toast and oven. We (I) had to have one.

When it arrived it still seemed too good to be true. A single long and semi-wide slot split the top of its sleek white exterior. When standing upright it was a toaster. You pushed a button and two grates emerged from the slot connected at the bottom by a “shelf” to receive your not-as-yet toast. Upon placing your toast-to-be between the grates and pressing the button again, the grates came together, gently taking it back down into the machine. It was as if they were saying to your pre-toast, “that’s OK, we have you now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

It was beautiful. When it was finished, it gently raised your toasted object back up like Rafiki holding a newborn Simba to the heavens in the Lion King. When you rotated the toaster 90 degrees on it’s long side, with the opening pointing towards you, it became a toaster oven. It had a tray and the grates became racks and you slid your toast with tomato and American cheese under the heating elements to warm it to gooey perfection.

As you can guess, there was a lot of rotating in our kitchen. First we toast, rotate, and then melt the cheese. After about two months it had had enough and one day refused to rise up to accept my bagel. It was under warranty and was replaced by another, which lasted two weeks. This was replaced by another nameless unit, which lasted three months. Then I met (online at Target) Michael Graves.

OK, first of all I already knew about him. The man whom The New York Times critic Paul Goldberger called “truly the most original voice American architecture has produced in some time.” I had seen his architecture and design work in magazines and books and had grown to appreciate his unique spin on things.

I admire Graves because he designs items that are organic in a smooth, rounded, comfortable-to-be-around kind of way, much like Jonathan Ives’ work at Apple, whose work I also admire. So I didn’t meet him per se as much as ran frantically to my computer to log on to Target.com when I learned he was designing housewares for the discount giant at a price I could afford. These were pieces every bit as spectacular as his Whistling Bird stainless steel teakettle, done for Alessi in 1985, which has become a design icon and sells for over $100. The Target pieces did not.

What I found and subsequently purchased was, and still is, Graves’ 1999 Industrial Designers Society of America Gold Medal Winning toaster. It is a beautiful white ovoid affair with his signature light blue “start toasting” handle and a light yellow “how dark” dial on the front, with small stainless steel disks arrayed like the floor numbers on an old elevator dial. This brave little toaster handles all kinds of bread, bagels, frozen waffles, waffle sticks, French toast and pancakes with aplomb. The unit has been functioning quite well for over two years and, knock on Herman Miller, shows no signs of letting up. It is a constant source of conversation with guests.

In the coffee area I have not fared as well. When our under cabinet Black and Decker coffee maker quit, OK not so much as quit as was figuratively thrown from a window, we went looking for a new one. We had to as this was in the dark days before Starbucks graced the gentle shores of the Norwalk River. Now I know that most folk under the age of 17 cannot imagine Wilton Center without Starbucks, but indeed there was a time, known by many as The Dark Ages, when there was nary a Venti Decaf Hazelnut Latte to be had for any price in these here parts. I don’t know how we survived either.

We replaced it with a ubiquitous Mr. Coffee machine, which was like playing Russian roulette every time you turned it on. Chances were 1 in 3 that the “stop dripping while you take the carafe out to pour a cup” stopper in the bottom of the basket would clog. The basket would overflow and the kitchen counter would rapidly resemble a re-enactment of Moses putting the Red Sea back together, but as done by Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood.

Taking pity on us, some friends gave us a Cuisinart Grind and Brew. This was like coffee Nirvana (the pre-grunge Nirvana), like Xanadu with caffeine. You poured in water and coffee beans, you got a great cup of coffee. First the coffee beans went in a hopper and the water in a reservoir. When the machine started, the coffee beans were rapidly ground emitting a sound not unlike five pounds of gravel placed in a clothes dryer (don’t experiment, just take my word on it). The newly pulverized coffee was then blown up a chute into the basket.

It also, however, coated everything inside the coffee maker with a fine brown powder. Once the steaming hot water started to flow, some of the steam would “effervesce” into the newly coated cavities and join with the brown powder to form coffee-crete. Not as strong as concrete but just hard enough that the daily cleaning of the machine gradually got longer and longer until we were spending the same amount of time getting ready to make coffee that Henry J. Kaiser took to build a Liberty Ship. It was at this point in our lives that Q-tips moved to the cabinet with the filters and coffee.

When the Cuisinart quit we decided against having it fixed. We were tired, out of Q-tips and our hands smelt of old coffee.

To replace the Pulverizer I turned, once again, to Michael Graves and Target. I already had the toaster, travel mug and the salt and pepper shakers with napkin rack and was happy with all of them both stylistically and functionally. This time it was his white 10 cup coffee maker with light blue and yellow accents. Perfect. When it arrived we eagerly unpacked it and set it up (we don’t get out much) and went to bed like kids on Christmas Eve awaiting the magic the morning would bring.

I awoke the next morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee sans the gravel-dryer sounds. I rose from my bed and walked into the kitchen to pour myself, and my wife, our first cups of coffee from the new machine. I got the mugs, the Equal and, for me, the half and half. I removed the carafe from the coffee maker and started to pour.

The beautiful stream of steamy caffeinated goodness flowing into the mug was immediately matched by a second stream of caffeinated goodness, which was flowing down the front of the carafe from the spout and pouring onto the counter. “Oh fiddlesticks,” I think I said and stopped pouring. I felt betrayed. Had Michael let me down? Of course he hadn’t. It was just a glitch in the carafe forming process that was causing the problem.

Through a three-week process of trial, error and paper towels I was able to achieve, and maintain to this day, a 90 percent success rate for coffee service. We decided to keep it anyway. My wife just pours over the sink.

Resources: all open new windows
Target: www.target.com
Michael Graves : www.michaelgraves.com
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