Countertop culture

My birthday is coming up next week, and it was on the day of my birthday four years ago when I bought a little countertop yogurt-maker.

My friend Ivy had started making yogurt using her Instant Pot, and thought I’d enjoy it. I was not yet ready to buy an Instant Pot, but this Dash yogurt-maker — now $25 — was only about $16 at the time.

I enjoyed making my own yogurt. It’s much cheaper than storebought (provided you use the scalding method with normal supermarket milk) and you can control everything. A quart of milk turns into a quart of plain yogurt (or a little less than a quart of Greek yogurt, if you decide to strain it).

Eventually, I did buy an Instant Pot, and started using its yogurt-making function. I gave my plastic yogurt-maker away to a friend here in town.

This week, my friend Kylene — who decided she was spending too much money on yogurt each week — asked for my advice on getting started in yogurt-making. She does not have, and wasn’t interested in getting, an Instant Pot, so I originally steered her to the same Dash machine that I started with four years ago.

I gave her this really long, mansplaining e-mail on yogurt-making, part of it similar to the post I made here once on the topic. But I felt vaguely guilty about it. It had actually been a couple of months since I’d made yogurt, and before that it had been even longer. Here I was, playing the expert, and I actually hadn’t been making yogurt all that often recently. I actually bought a tub — which I never do…