Drills Are Multitasking in the Kitchen

More putzing than practical — but it’s the pandemic, so why not?

Alexi Morrissey using a drill on a Japanese hand grinder to grind coffee. Photo: Melissa McCart via Vimeo

This far into the pandemic, boredom meets inspiration, and power tools are making an appearance in home kitchens. While we’re not seeing any mini-saws multitasking as sourdough bread cutters, the drill is coming into its own.

Alton Brown, for example, is using a drill in seasoning his holiday rib roast. After rubbing meat with oil and salt, he wants to season it with two tablespoons of fresh ground pepper. But rather than grinding it by hand with a pepper mill, he takes a Japanese coffee grinder made for camping and swaps the handle for a cordless drill.

Over in Pittsburgh, my buddy Alexi Morrissey, an artist who’s spending tons of pandemic time in his studio, is a coffee fiend — and uses his baby drill on another Japanese hand grinder for a faster way to create a superfine grind.

“If you were gonna hand-grind this f’ing thing, you would be here forever,” he says, “It’s like, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” — 13 minutes long.” (The song, actually, may not be that long.)

I’m kind of into this epic cleaning option, below, as well as the drill-as-hand-mixer, since I don’t have the latter.

None of these hacks is new, necessarily. We’re just seeing a mini resurgence of power tools in the kitchen as a way to delight and distract ourselves, months and months into the pandemic.

Whatever it takes.