Cooking Eggs, Burgers, Hot Dogs, & More with a Hotel Iron!

Who needs room service 😉 ! This is pretty awesome, who would have thought and the final products look delicious too! Egg omelet sandwich, broccoli, hot dogs, pizza, and s’mores. Just watch out for the yolk in the steam holes.   Thanks to reader Liz M for sharing this very cool article with us courtesy of BestReviews. NOTE THAT the pictures below (besides the hot dogs) are in their raw state. You must click on the link above to see the final cooked product..it’s worth it!

We have heard a rumor that some guests use hotel irons to prepare simple meals. Allegedly, it’s the convenience, cost savings, and special diets that drive the behavior. To get to the bottom of this rumor, we took a standard iron and tried to prepare food on it. We started with a hot dog since the cooking requirements are pretty straightforward. Because most hot dogs use pre-cooked meat, all we needed to do was to heat up the dogs. We used the cotton (highest) setting and surprisingly, the iron did a fantastic job of heating up our meal quickly and efficiently.

Next, we moved over to slightly a more involved task – cooking a non-readymade cheeseburger. We prepared the iron using the linen setting for 5 minutes and then laid out the ground beef onto the base of the iron. We turned on the cotton setting and watched as the meat slowly turned brown after about 15 minutes. While the iron wasn’t able to produce the handsome grill marks that usually come with a barbecued burger, the end product tasted just as juicy as if it were made the old-fashioned way.

But could an iron prepare a more difficult meal? We tried making one of our favorite breakfast meals: an egg omelet sandwich. We put the egg on the base of the iron and watched it fry. It was a bit disgusting to see the yolk seep into the steam holes on the base of the iron and drip off of the edges, but we carried on.

Using the linen setting on the steam iron, the egg cooked quickly, and we turned our efforts to preparing the ham and cheese for the sandwich. All in all, the final product came out quite tasty, although the toast did seem to burn a little bit more than we would have liked. We recommend heating up the toast with the wool setting (300ºF) to prevent burning.

Next, we decided to use the steam iron for a make-shift pizza oven. It seemed like a no-brainer. After all, the base of the steam iron perfectly matched the shape of a pizza slice.
We began by spreading out a triangular shaped piece of dough over the iron and then rolled it back to create a crust edge. We couldn’t quite toss the dough like we’re used to with a circular pizza, so we had to stretch it out with our hands instead. We then used the cotton setting of the steam iron to pre-bake the crust for 6 minutes so as not to get “doughy crust” that usually kills most homemade pizzas. From there, the rest of the procedure was pretty normal as we spread the sauce and the toppings onto the pizza and watched it bake. It took slightly longer to finish than usual, but the crust began to turn brown after around 16 minutes, and the cheese fully melted around the 20 minute mark. In the end, the pizza came out of the “oven” in tip top shape. We couldn’t resist taking a bite!

Steamed broccoli seemed like another logical meal to prepare. After all, we need to put that “burst of steam” button on our iron to the test. We placed an individual broccoli stem onto the iron and switched on the cotton setting. We used the iron’s steam button, and the broccoli slowly began to turn bright green. Some irons don’t allow the steam function to work if the iron isn’t in the proper orientation (pointing down), but the iron we tested managed to have no problem with it upside down, and after several refills of the water tank, the broccoli was ready to go!

Finally, it was time for some dessert. What better way to use the steam iron holes than to have them double as marshmallow stick holders? The holes were actually just deep enough to have the marshmallows close to the base of the iron and get the proper amount of heat from the iron.

From there, making the actual s’mores was a cinch. The highest setting on the iron was a good substitute for an open bonfire, and within 10 minutes, the melted Hershey’s milk chocolate was beginning to seep into the base of the iron.

We don’t know how common hotel-iron-cooking is, but it certainly is feasible. With some ingenuity and a few creative uses of the iron’s settings, you can re-create pretty much any homemade kitchen meal.

So think twice next time you use your hotel’s steam iron. The last thing you want is to show up to your morning business meeting with pizza sauce all over your dress shirt!