Transplants

The whole 1,800 miles from Blackrock to our new house in New Mexico, I had two very important jars in our food coolers. One jar contained my sourdough starter. I knew I could make another starter from scratch if necessary in New Mexico, but it takes a week or so and I wanted to be able to make bread right away.

The other jar contained homemade yogurt to use as yogurt starter. That yogurt's original starter was yogurt from a farm near the MiL's house that A. bought over four years ago. I was pretty sure I would not be finding a farm with homemade yogurt near our new house in beef cattle country.

So I brought all those native New York bacteria with me.

I wasn't sure how well they would travel. Though they did keep cool in the coolers all the way, there was a lot of jostling and some temperature variation as ice melted and was added.

Three hours after walking in our new door, I mixed the sourdough starter with water and flour and crossed my fingers. Twenty-four hours after arriving at our new house, I was taking loaves of bread out of the oven*.

The next day was yogurt day. When I put them in the refrigerator here, the yogurt looked as if there was a lot of liquid separated. I was not all that confident that it would work to start new yogurt, but I only had a gallon of milk to lose if it didn't, and no other way to get a yogurt starter without driving 100 miles.

I made the yogurt without a thermometer, because I hadn't found it yet. I've been making yogurt long enough now that I can roughly gauge the right time to do everything, anyway.

The yogurt worked, too.

So now we have a little bit of New York in our New Mexico kitchen. Success.

* Loaves that had been in the oven for almost two hours, because, at 6,000 feet, I am now solidly in high-altitude baking range. This is going to be a learning experience.