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As a teenager who thought that vanilla lattes were a personality trait, my entire vision of a luxurious home built for cool, powerful adults was that it would have an espresso machine in it. Now, I’m neither cool nor powerful, and my home doesn’t even have a dishwasher. But I do have the Breville Bambino Plus, a relatively affordable little espresso machine that makes darn good coffee (read more about why we love it here). I think my teenage self would be impressed by my fancy coffee apparatus, but also disappointed that I never really make vanilla lattes. I don’t actually even use the milk steamer on the machine all that much. I mostly make plain espresso or Americanos. But I still use the stainless-steel milk-steaming pitchers that came with the espresso machine almost every day.
You probably know the steaming pitchers I’m talking about; they usually come in the package with any espresso maker that you’d buy. But you shouldn’t be limiting yourself to using them only in that way. These pitchers are essentially an additional piece of cookware. I put mine right on the stovetop and use them to reheat coffee, warm maple syrup, melt butter, toast spices, make chili oil, and basically any time I need a pan for an extremely small quantity of something. I separate eggs and store whichever part I didn’t use for the recipe in the milk canister with a silicone lid over the top. I warm up small amounts of sauce in these little pitchers; it’s actually better for this than putting a little bit of sauce on a pan with more surface area, because I’m prone to scorching sauces when they’re thinly spread out over a wide surface like this. And I use the handy pour spout to drizzle sauces over the top of a dish in an aesthetically pleasing way. Many of these pitchers even have measurement markings on the inside, so you know how much butter you’ve warmed or sauce you’re adding to a dish. And, of course, on weekend mornings when I’d like to luxuriate over an oat milk latte, the milk canisters are there for me then too.
Rest assured that there’s no need to own an espresso machine to make use of stainless-steel milk pitchers—you can buy them separately. In fact, if you like a café au lait, you could buy one of these and a handheld milk frother, warming the milk in the canister and then whipping it, all the while getting the fancy coffee experience at the fraction of the cost of owning an espresso machine. I found these things so useful that I bought an additional canister to the one that came with my machine. You might find yourself using these pitchers so frequently for warming syrup or butter that you almost forgot the impact they have on your coffee.
