A few days ago, armed with an X-Acto knife and a page of scribbled notes gleaned from a phone conversation with my father, I embarked on a mission to make yogurt.
The first goal was to install a dimmer switch on my Crock Pot.
Confession: I didn’t own a Crock Pot before I had the sudden, urgent craving for homemade yogurt, and so I went out and bought one. I could just as easily have purchased a yogurt-maker and saved myself the DIY hassle, but then: what if I want to make pot roast someday? What if I have a hankering to put a chicken in a warm, cozy place to cook for the better part of a day? Mind you, these are things I’ve never done before, but I’m of the Why Buy Two Appliances When You Can Buy One persuasion, and so I bought the Crock Pot.
It is terribly thrilling to take a brand new appliance out of the box and proceed to cut. it. up. If you've never done it before, you simply must. My dad had instructed me to slice into the large-pronged side of the cord; my X-Acto blade neatly split the cord in two, and then – whack! – sliced straight through the larger half. Whee! Look at me! I'm cutting things! I struggled with the wire stripper for a few moments before tossing it aside in favor of the X-Acto blade (why use two tools when you can use one?). A few quick strokes, and I had a half-inch of exposed wire on each side, making it a cinch to install the dimmer switch.
I placed another call to Portland: “You said to bind the wires with electrical tape, but is it okay to use those little plastic thingies that screw on top?”
(pause)
“You know? Those things that look like tiny hard hats? Kind of?”
Him: “Oh, those. Right. Yes. But tape it anyway, just to be sure you don’t have any exposed wire.”
In a matter of moments, my Crock Pot went from a bland white lump hulking on the countertop to a jiggered-up science-project-ish Piece of Work. I have to tell you: I was quite proud of the transformation.
As my goal was to reproduce the yogurt my dad had made years ago, I began with raw milk, as he used to do. I heated the milk just shy of the boiling point, then removed it from the heat to let it cool.
It might seem to defeat the purpose of using raw milk to heat it up,
but since the milk is going to sit in a lukewarm bath for several
hours, you do want to kill any bacteria that might grow alongside the
Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Lactobacillus acidophilus and other yogurt
cultures, as random bacteria might contribute sour or funky flavors
that would create an “off” taste.