Burning the Milk and Making it Into Yogurt Anyway

I like making yogurt.  It is not too complicated:
Heat the milk. (to just below boiling)
Cool the milk (to warm enough that you can touch it)
Add a little plain yogurt. (one Tablespoon per quart)
Pour the cultured milk into jars.
Put the lidded jars in a pot filled with hot tap water and keep it warm by wrapping the lidded pot in a fleece jacket.
Walk away.
Come back the next day, or at the end of the day if you started in the morning and you have yogurt.

When I was a child my mom had a plug-in yogurt maker that came with a special thermometer and plug-in machine that could incubate four 8 ounce ceramic jars at a time.  When I was in college I learned that I could make yogurt by the gallon without the help of a yogurt machine or thermometer. My friend Nacim, whose mom is from Iran, taught her that you just need to hold your finger in the milk and count to seven. If you can keep it there without pulling it out than it is cool enough.

When my family was on WIC and got more gallons of milk than we could ever consume, yogurt making helped to preserve the milk and our digestive tracks.  When we lived in an intentional community with an abundance of raw milk I made yogurt for our household and for the family that lived next door, but I was never the yogurt maker for the whole community.  Now that we are back to living on our own and buying our own groceries I still love to make yogurt because it is much less expensive than store-bought and it only contains milk and an older version of itself. It seems like yogurt making holds a modern parable of community building and personal transformation: a little bit of starter makes the fresh milk hold together into a more solidified superfood.

The only thing that is complicated about making yogurt is heating the milk.  The milk needs to be stirred, not constantly, but enough to prevent scorching.  I have made gallons of yogurt and only burned the milk a few times.  If burnt milk is any indicator of how distracted I'm feeling, in the past month, I have had to scrape a thick black crust of burned milk off of the bottom of the pot not once, but twice.  Both times I made the same mistake.  I turned on the heat and walked into the next room to sit at my computer.  Both times I lost track of time by sometimes writing my own words but more likely reading someone else's writing or advice about writing and then the smell of charred dairy pulled me back to reality.  (I also realize that our back burner runs a little hot.  Maybe the stove's to blame)

We all know not to cry over spilled milk but what is one to do with a pot of burned milk?  My advice: don't stir the bottom and do make the most of it.  Last time I let the milk cool in the pot and it was very difficult to wash it later.  By very difficult I mean that it sat on the counter for days.  I kept adding hot soapy water and letting it soak.  Finally, I begged Michael to use his extra elbow grease to get it clean. This time, I quickly poured the milk into another pot and then submerged the burnt pot in water right away.

As I was scraping up my mistake with the spatula, I was struck by the beauty of freshly burnt milk.  It looked like reptilian skin or the barnacled surface of a tidewater pool brimming with algae and salty life.  It looked like woodsy fungus, or bubbling tarpits, or the surface of cooling lava or the crazy crackly surface of pot pulled from a Raku firing.  It reminded me of those photos in kids' magazines that ask you to guess what you see.  So I snapped this shot:

Then I scraped the pot clean while it was still soft and pliable.

For several weeks now, I've found myself humming the refrain to the song You Make Beautiful Things. I first heard this song during a Resurrection Sunday service 2 years ago.  In our community, we have an outdoor sunrise service for Easter that starts with people filling the cross wrapped in chicken wire with freshly picked flowers. On that particular Sunday, there was rain in the forecast so we stayed inside and had the service with a bare cross at the center. Toward the end of the service, my friend Jess sang this song while we all transformed a symbol of torture and death into something bursting with beauty and life.

I didn't make a beautiful thing from the burnt milk, but I noticed beauty in it.  Can we see beauty in the burnt people and places in our lives?

It would be nice to think that burning the milk was my only problem.  I keep making mistakes, stupid, preventable mistakes that I have made before.  My mouth keeps moving faster than my brain or slower than my heart.  I hurt the ones I love the most with things said and unsaid, actions taken and passively avoided.  I'll need to keep cleaning up the messes from those mistakes and the quicker the better.  There is nothing beautiful in hurting others or ourselves, but I'm beginning to see that grace is what can happen when we see beauty even in our wounds.

Our society is going to keep seeming like its broken and divided beyond repair, our wounds too deep, our memories too raw, the damage too hideous.  We have messes of history, of mistakes we have inherited, we inhabit crumbling structures built on lies and exploitation. We will spend our lives working to scrape off layers of neglect and exploitation of the earth and one another.

We will keep mixing the old with the new and making the most of it.  The flavor of my most recent batch of yogurt has a slightly charred reminder of my mistake, but its ok. Honey and fruit make it more than tolerable. It is good, even though it's not perfect.  The next batch will be better. If I can accept that good yogurt can still come from burnt milk, then maybe there's grace enough for me and the people I know who are all a little burnt around the edges.