Coffee heat rising

How to Make Your Own Yogurt

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P1020618It worked! Yesterday, in a great flashback to my hippy-dippy days, I took it into my shaggy little head to try to make some yogurt. This was very popular among the back-to-the-earth set in the 60s and 70s, mostly because home-made yogurt allegedly would contain fewer contaminants than what you could buy in a store, and also because store-bought yogurt wasn’t the greatest. Nevvermind that you couldn’t get organic, antibiotic-free milk unless you had a cow in the backyard. As a practical matter, homemade yogurt tasted a great deal better than what you could get in a supermarket, where the best of a mediocre lot was Mountain High.

Today the yogurt you can buy is much, much better. However, the rage for Greek-style yogurt has taken over the world, and now you can’t easily buy plain ordinary boring yogurt. Sometimes you’d like the thinner product, though, to make soups like xergis and for blended drinks. Also, organic yogurt isn’t cheap, whether or not it’s been strained to resemble Greek yogurt.

Out came my old Laurel’s Kitchen, the standby of hippy-dippy vegetarian chefs. Laurel’s recipe for yogurt involved adding powdered milk — and not the instant kind. Not having any of that and having no idea even where to buy it, I moved on to the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Cookbook, another back-to-the-earther standby. They would allow you to use instant powdered milk.

I have no use for the stuff and am not going to go out and buy it.

Those folks with the yaks on the high steppes, I figured, did not have powdered milk hanging around the yurt. It simply had to be possible to make yogurt without recourse to an industrial foodoid.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I picked up a half-gallon of hormone-free milk and a package of Green Mountain Creamery’s finest organic Greek-style yogurt. And here’s how the caper came down:

You need

• ½ gallon milk
• ½ cup good-quality commercial yogurt

Read the ingredients on the yogurt container. Be sure the product contains “live culture,” meaning the critters that turn milk into yogurt — and benefit your innards — are still bouncing around in there.

Gather Your Gear

• a large saucepan or small dutch oven, with lid
• a spatula or wooden spoon
• a candy thermometer or some decent common sense
• a wire whisk
• an oven that will heat to a very low temperature and that has a working light, or a heating pad, or a refrigerator that exhausts warm air in a place where you can place a stoneware bowl (in which case you will need a stoneware bowl large enough to hold ½ gallon of milk
oven thermometer, if you’re using the oven
• a sink or large clean pail
• ice
• cold tap water
• optional (see below): clean bath towel and large stoneware bowl
• clean containers to store the finished yogurt

•  Step 1: Heat the Milk

In your saucepan or Dutch oven, heat the milk over medium heat to right below boiling. On  a candy thermometer, this is 200° Fahrenheit. You really don’t need a thermometer, though. The milk has reached the right temperature when it begins to show a skiff of light foam on the top, especially around the edges of the pan — tiny bubbles form on the surface at this stage. Gently stir the milk as it heats to make sure the bottom doesn’t scorch and the milk doesn’t boil over. This step is necessary to prevent the yogurt from separating later on. (As usual, click on the image to see the details.)

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Step 2: Cool the Milk

Dump a bunch of ice into a clean kitchen sink or clean bucket large enough to hold your pan. Pour in enough water to reach almost up to the top of the pan. Set the pan directly into this cold water. Stirring steadily with the wire whip, let the milk cool until it is just hot to the touch, 112°F – 115°F. It should feel more than lukewarm, but not scalding hot.

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Step 3: Inoculate the Milk 

Drop ½ cup of  yogurt into the warm milk. Whisk it in well using the wire whip. Blend the two ingredients smoothly, leaving no lumps of yogurt behind.

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Step 4: Incubate the Yogurt

Now you simply keep the  mixture warm until it sets up into yogurt. The trick is keeping the milk around 110°F until it has set, usually four to eight hours. You can do this easily in a commercial yogurt maker, but it’s not at all necessary.

If you have an oven whose temperature will stay low enough, by all means use that.

If your oven maker’s idea of “warm” is somewhere around 200 to 250 degrees, you can still use it but you’ll need an oven thermometer. Once the yogurt is cool, put the lid on the pan and wrap the pan with a clean towel to insulate it. Place the oven thermometer inside the oven and turn the oven to the lowest heat offered. When the temperature reaches 115 degrees, turn the oven off and turn on the oven light. Place the yogurt into the oven, close the door, and go away. If the temperature in the house is fairly cool, you may need to turn the oven back on briefly to maintain the temperature — but be sure to keep an eye on that thermometer.

Alternatively, you can get a large stoneware bowl and pour hot tap water into it, to warm it through. Then transfer the milk into the bowl. Wrap it in a clean bath towel and then set it in the oven with the oven light turned on, or set it in the warm exhaust of a refrigerator, or set it on a heating pad set to “low” or “medium.”

My oven, however, will hold at about 100 to 115 degrees. So, if you have an oven with a “warming” feature like this, heat it to about 100 to 110 degrees. Place the pan in the oven, close the door, and go away. An oven thermometer is useful to help you keep an eye on the heat, but if you don’t have one and you don’t trust the oven, simply prop the door open slightly during the incubation. If the pan is very full and you have any concern at all about spilling milk in the oven, place a cookie sheet under the pan. I’ve found this is unnecessary, but just in case, it could avoid a clean-up.

Be careful not to jostle the milk too much as it’s incubating, so that it will set properly. This process will take from four to eight hours, depending on how tangy you like your yogurt.

The longer the yogurt sits, the thicker and more tangy it gets. After about four hours, open the pan and taste the yogurt. It should be creamy, like a barely-set custard, and the flavor will be tart yet milky. If you like it at this stage, pull it out and refrigerate it. If you’d like it tangier, leave it for another hour or two. I left it in the oven for about six or eight hours, producing a thick, zingy yogurt.

Step 5: Cool and Store the Yogurt

Leaving the yogurt in the pan or bowl you used for incubation, place it into the refrigerator. Once it’s completely chilled, transfer it into air-tight containers and store it in the refrigerator, where it will keep about two weeks. Sometimes you’ll find a layer of watery whey on top of the yogurt, just as you may find with organic grocery-store yogurt. Stir it back into the yogurt or, if you prefer, strain it off.

Et voilà! That’s it. The five-step process makes this sound time-consuming, but in fact it’s not, because most of the time the live culture does the work while  you go off and entertain yourself with something else.

Since yogurt is getting kind of pricey these days, making your own has become quite cost-effective. After you’ve made it once, you can use your own to start future batches, meaning you never have to buy another expensive container of yogurt again. All you’ll ever have to buy is the milk.

Hair Conditioner as…Bathroom Cleaner???

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Faucet_in_a_bathroom_sinkHang onto your hats, folks: here’s a truly weird household hint. Diluted hair conditioner works, quite nicely and pretty efficiently, to clean the brightwork in your bathroom. Matter of fact, it’ll clean the sink and countertop, too. And probably the bathtub, if you’re in the mood to experiment.

The bizarre factoid came my way by pure serendipity. By accident, as a matter of fact.

As you may recall, I like to make my own glass cleaner, fabricating it with the same active ingredients that Windex uses. The product, which is clear as water, resides in a Home Depot industrial-strength squirt bottle in a bathroom cabinet. And not so long ago, I learned to pre-condition the dog’s fur before washing her by spraying her with diluted hair conditioner and working it into her fox-like pelt. Yesh. Supposedly if you do this, it somehow creates magnificent results.

Well, it doesn’t. It serves mostly to enhance the degree of canine annoyance at the dog-bathing experience. HOWEVER, this much-diluted hair conditioner (about 1 part conditioner to five or six or more parts water) does have a salutary effect on the human’s fur, when the weather in the low desert is so dry that static electricity makes it stand up all over one’s head like you stuck your finger in a light socket. A very light misting of the stuff instantly eliminates the hair-crackle, and, as a bonus, enhances one’s natural curl. Assuming one has that to start with.

This clear stuff also resides in a Home Depot industrial-strength squirt bottle in the bathroom cabinet.

So, as you may now imagine, the other day when it was past time to clean the bathroom, I reached under the cabinet and hauled out the spray bottle of DIY Windex. Squirted it all over the faucet and sink and tile countertop and…thought well, hell!

I’d managed to douse everything with hair conditioner. This, the train of thought continued, is going to be one big, gloppy mess to clean up!!!!!

Hauled out the paper towels, figuring to soak up the worst of it and then scrub, scrub, and scrub again with Simple Green to get the rest of it off.

But…nooooo!

It wiped off the hard surfaces like a freaking dream! It left the faucet clean, bright, and shiny. Did the same to the tile.

I expected it just looked that way, so attempted to rinse what I imagined was the rest off with water.

Nothing. No glop, no suds, no slime.

WTF?

Cautiously, I squirted a bit of it on the kitchen faucet.

Polished the thing right up.

Okay. The acid test: I apply my powdered mineral makeup in the back bathroom, where the light is adequate. The stuff settles on every available surface, merrily staining the sink and countertop a lovely “medium-beige” puce and requiring some serious cleaning to keep the place more or less presentable. So it was off to the back bathroom with the squirt bottle full of diluted hair conditioner.  If this doesn’t make the mess from Hell, I figured, nothing will!

Apparently nothing will. It cleaned the back bathroom sink and faucet right up, just as bright and shiny as if I’d washed it down with Lysol or Simple Green. And it smelled a lot better.

I have no idea what on earth the chemistry behind this phenomenon might be. We do know that some women have taken to washing their tresses with hair conditioner, having developed, for reasons incomprehensible to personkind, an abiding suspicion of shampoo. And we also know that a very light skiff of olive oil or other vegetable oil will polish chrome faucets quite prettily. But…but…hair conditioner as bathroom cleaner?

Dunno. All I know is it worked.

Image: Tomwsulcer. Faucet in a Bathroom Sink. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Loafifarious Morning

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It’s a quarter to 11, the morning pot of coffee has yet to be consumed (because it didn’t come into being until about 10:30), the morning walk has not been walked, I have done NOTHING, in 45 minutes Cassie and I are heading for La Maya’s house, and I am not even dressed. Okay, okay…I have an excuse for loafing: I read the magazine-writing students’ papers till 2:00 this morning.

But that was only because I spent the several usable hours of yesterday afternoon loafing.

Today I’ve got to backwash the pool (which in theory I could do right now…), read papers for the other course, shovel off the desk, finish the bookkeeping, figure out what happened to the tickets to the Bach Festival, and really…I should clean house.

The immediate cause for all this celebratory loafing is that I finally finished editing the esteemed Chinese graduate student’s dissertation. That was an experience! It actually turned out to be more difficult than I expected because, paradoxically, her English is better than many Chinese scholars’. As a result, the techno-statistico-psychobabble she was emitting by way of earning a Ph.D. from one of the most prestigious universities in Asia was deceptively understandable. Because I rarely had much trouble catching what she was trying to say, at irregular intervals various nonidiomatic turns of phrase would slip past me. Then when I went back for a second read, my jaw kept dropping.

OMG! Five biplanes just flew over in formation, wingtip to wingtip, their old reciprocating engines thundering away! What a hoot!!!!!

So I ended up foisting the edits onto my sidekick Tina to review, even though I’m taking graduate-student pay from the client and can’t afford to pay Tina a fair rate to read the stuff. She found still more stuff that I’d missed. So that took another couple of days and required me to go through the whole thing yet again, reading behind her. Finally shipped the thing off yesterday, feeling the effects of brain-fry.

There they go again. They must be flying over a Veteran’s Day parade.

Welp, in my opinion, watching guys fly around in old Sopwith Camels is a lot more fun than blogging. And so, away…

Sopwith_F-1_Camel_2_USAF

HAPPY VETERAN’S DAY!

Dishwasher Purchase, Chapter 2 :-)

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Dishwasher_open_for_loadingHey! Despite all the concern about whether my dinnerware will fit in the bottom rack of the budget-busting new dishwasher, lo! Those gigantic plates fit just FINE. That the tines are closer together means they stand up straighter, take up less space, and so the machine can hold MANY more dishes than the Late Lamented Unit did.

Not only that, but somehow Bosch has managed to redesign the top rack so that — mirabilis! — it holds the wine glasses!! Not only holds them, but holds them with plenty of room to spare!

The old one wouldn’t hold them upright (so they always gathered hard-water spots where water pooled near the rim and on the bottom of the foot), and the fit was so tight that when you closed the top rack they’d sometimes fall over. So there’s a pain in the tuchus that no longer applies.

What a freaking day. You’d think that waiting around for a repairman to show up would be fairly dull, wouldn’t you? Ah, but that’s in real life. The Funny Farm exists in a universe parallel to but slightly out of whack with the Real World.

To start with, certain food items were running low. So I had to make a run on the grocery store, an expedition from where I am.

Then, it’s been so long since I cleaned house that the entire shack lay beneath a layer of litter and debris. Bills were unpaid (most of them still are, as we scribble). The calendar was under a pile of loose papers, so if I was supposed to do anything I had no idea what it might be. Trash was strewn across the dining table, the desks, the floor in the TV room. It had been so long since I’d changed the sheets that Cassie and I were beginning to get nervous about climbing onto the bed. Cassie’s dog-hair-catching bed blanket was white with shed fur. Ugh.

So this morning I had to throw myself around to get through this stuff before InstallerMan showed up.

Meanwhile, I’d fobbed the Chinese Statistico-Psychological Study onto Tina, officially the Associate Editor here at The Copyeditor’s Desk. She had read through it, found a pile of stuff I’d missed and dreamed up some new issues that needed to be fixed, and sent it back. So I needed to finish reading 80 exceptionally opaque pages and do it now, since we are way, way, way, way late in returning this thing to the client.

Fortunately, Client is busying herself with applying for post-docs, a chore that, you can bet, is distracting her attention nicely from our shortcomings.

Hours pass. Hours filled with mind-numbing ditz. Hours filled with batsh!t CHAOS.

InstallerMan, scheduled to show up between 1 and 5, surfaces closer to 1 than to 5. When he phones to announce his advent, he asks me to empty all the junk out from under the sink.

Ducky. I’m in the middle of this complicated, damn near incomprehensible project and now I’ve got to drop everything, get down on hands and knees, and shovel out the freaking kitchen cabinetry!

Luckily, rather little is under there, so it’s not that big a deal. Except that the interruption is annoying.

Back to work. Twenty minutes later, the guy shows up and Cassie greets him with a yapfest. I let him in, move my car, and open the garage door so he can get the contraption into the house with the least possible hassle. Then it’s back to the laptop, trying to get through the Chinglish.

Cassie can’t stand it. She launches into a new yapping frenzy about every three to five minutes. I’m constantly having to quiet her down, and even if I try to ignore her ear-splitting barks, I can not concentrate on this stuff while she’s carrying on and the workman is tromping back and forth.

It takes him an hour or so to get the dishwasher in. During that time, unknown to me he tries to shut off the water to the house — the clothes washer is full of sheets and this will cause God only knows what to happen to THAT pricey contraption; if he’d said something I would’ve gotten up and shut off the washer. The main valve leaks, so, afraid he won’t be able to stop that, he shuts it off, comes into the house, and shuts off the water at the valve under the sink. That leaks, too.

He asks for a bowl so as not to flood the kitchen. I can see we’ll be calling the plumber soon, another gerzillion bucks down the drain.

He manages to get the machine installed. The leak stops. I wish him a happy Thanksgiving, wave good-bye, move the car back into the garage, and race back to the computer.

Finally, finally, finally I arrive at the end of this exercise. A moment of extraordinary good luck occurs: I hit “save” before doing the file conversions I wished to do, and I cleverly saved the project to DropBox.

Can you not see what’s coming?

But of course. When I tried to produce clean copy containing only notes & queries, Word instantly hung.

And it stayed hung. Permanently.

Fukkaroonies.

Trudge into the office, get onto the giant iMac. Save and close every open Wyrd file, of which there were a-plenty (multi-tasking is what I do instead of breathing). Surprisingly, find the saved file in DropBox — something has been saved, anyway.

Persuade file to open — another surprise. Search for the most recent changes…find them. Another surprise. Rename and save to a new directory. It works. Apparently the file has not corrupted. These miracles may never cease.

The big computer compliantly manipulated the damn file as desired and I shipped it off to the client.

Thank heaven for DropBox! If that file had resided on the laptop, I would’ve been SOL.

Anyway, the thing is now mailed to Shanghai; next, the bookkeeping. But first: dinner.

Putting the cleaning gear back under the sink, what should I find but that this connection box thing — very clearly an electrical connection for the machine’s power cord — is laying on the floor of the cabinet, right next to where the cut-off valve allegedly is leaking. It has little holes drilled in its frame — evidently it’s intended to be bolted to a vertical surface. Instead, it’s laying on a surface prone to flooding with leaking water.

Electric box…meet water. Water…meet electric box.

Helle’s Belles. Now I’ll have to call the plumber first thing Monday. Like I haven’t already bankrupted myself!

Image: Open Dishwasher Loaded with Dishes. Carlos Paes. Public domain.

Dishwasher Scored, Zillions of Bucks Fly out the Door

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Ooohhhkayyy…. So I found the dishwasher, but had to pay full price for it — over $700 after pretend rebates. Unfreakingbelievable.

The Sears Outlet store didn’t have any Bosch washers. But Sears was having one of its three-day-weekend PUHLEEEEZE SOMEONE COME BACK TO OUR STORE sales, so I went over there because I’d found discount coupons on the Web and because I was also interested in the Kenmore.

There I encountered this highly entertaining saleslady, one Amy, a Lebanese woman with more personality than any three humans, an exotic accent, and a real gift for selling. I love to watch people who can sell when they really get on a roll. By golly, she was gonna send one of these contraptions out the door. She was good, she had a sense of humor, and she was very fun to deal with.

As you can imagine, she wanted to sell a Kenmore. She did not want to sell a GE — after the last year’s massive recall when the things were determined to be a fire hazard, she doesn’t trust them, plus she apparently knew someone whose GE in fact did start a fire. So as far as she was concerned, the choices were Kenmore or Bosch, and Bosch or Kenmore. 😀

In fact, the Kenmore is a very nice machine. I much prefer the layout of the racks. The top rack can be moved up and down a little more easily than the Bosch’s, and both racks are far more intelligently designed. You can get A LOT of dishes in there, and you don’t have to fiddle around to get a wine glass to stand up to be washed without breaking off its foot when you push the rack back in.

Problem is, it has this weird, complicated lower spray arm assembly adorning the sprayer on the bottom of the tub. On one end, the thing has a geared attachment that apparently spins around, rotating along a large plastic gear. It cries out to break off. All it would take is one wooden spoon to slip off the top shelf and protrude an inch beneath the bottom rack, and voilà! a whopping repair bill! And after all these years with a Bosch, I find I’m no longer nuts about having an oven-like metal heating element in the bottom, directly below my dishes.

It also has a lot of other moving parts and a bunch of dome-like sprayers on the back wall. IMHO, way, way too many moving parts and sprayers. Asked if the thing had more than one circulating pump with which to drive all that junk, our Amy didn’t even know what I was talking about.

All the low to mid-range Bosch models now have a plastic floor on the bottom of the tub. I said no, the interior has to be ALL stainless steel, not “sorta” stainless steel. Okay, said she; we went to see the lowest-priced model with a full stainless steel interior. Price: almost $700.

Holy sh!t.

So I waffled. Went back to the Kenmore, which was a mere $600. Inspected it again. Decided that yes, it is a repair bill waiting to happen.

The $150 gouge for delivery, installation, and the “installation kit” rip-off jacked the price up to $833. The discounts she had didn’t apply to that model, to her disgust, The annoying mail-in rebate nuisance will theoretically drop the price back down to $708, assuming they honor it and assuming I get around to using it — it comes in the form of an aggravating Visa debit card, which I really don’t want. Seems to me last time I had to screw around with one of those from Sears, I was able to get them to send me a check, which will help some. Assuming, as I say, it actually materializes.

So much for replacing Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner this winter.

Bosch has redesigned its interior. The filter assembly is closer to the front, making it more convenient to see and easier to get at. That’s good. You don’t have to clean the filter in these things often — theoretically it’s self-cleaning — but a service dude once showed me how to take it apart and recommended an occasional manual clean-up. Occasionally cleaning the parts you can get to indeed does help the machine to work better and last longer.

Instead of a small utensil basket toward the front or back, the Bosch now has a very long, very large basket that fits along the right-hand side of the unit. It takes up a lot of space, IMHO — it would be good for a large family, but I just don’t use that many knives, forks, and spoons.

The bottom rack has a lot more prong thingies to prop up plates. Placed very close together, they now align in two directions — left-to-right in the back half of the rack and front-to-back in the front half. If you have relatively small dishware, these will probably accommodate a lot more plates than the old one did. However…I don’t have relatively small dishes. My Heathware is a direct throwback to the 1960s, when people still ate off full-sized dinner plates. They’re stoneware, which makes them fairly thick and heavy. So they may not fit into this rack at all.

However, it dawned on me as I was looking at the thing that the actual shape and size of the tub itself is the same as mine. My racks are in excellent condition —  not a nick or a sign of rust anywhere. So I’m going to pull the racks out and stash them in the garage before the installer gets here today. Then if the plates won’t fit in the new one, all I’ll have to do is slide the old one in.

My utensil basket may fit in the basket space along the side — probably not, though — I think mine is wider than the long thing they’re using now. But if it will go in there and my plates will fit in the bottom rack, that will free up a lot of space in the bottom rack. A frying pan could easily fit in the space Bosch has dedicated to the silverware.

So, I’m not thrilled. There’s a lot to complain about here:

• A machine that should last a good eighteen to twenty years engineered to crap out after eight or nine years
• Nuisancey mail-in rebates instead of a single fair and reasonable price for the product (Gawd how I hate those!!)
• An uninvited and unwelcome debit card instead of a real discount
• Extra “installation kits” that you have to buy, when they should be included as part of the unit
• A redesign that may not fit my dishes
• Cheeseying-up of models that fall into the “almost affordable” price range
• Prices that are simply way, way too high to make sense at all

When this one gives out, seriously: I’ll probably just go back to washing dishes by hand. That’s a chore I profoundly dislike and don’t do very well…but it’s ridiculous to pay this much for a few clean plates and forks.

Researching the Next Dishwasher Purchase

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Last night I spent the entire evening studying dishwashers on the Internet. Couldn’t get into Consumer Reports, but decided not to pony up the toll to get past the paywall because in the past I’ve found some of their reviews for big-ticket items to be not altogether reliable. However, I was able to break into a few CR reviews by googling [dishwasher name] and [reviews].  Good Housekeeping, however, has what appears to be a good set of appliance reviews, and I’ve found Amazon reviews usually give one a fair clue if there are a decent number of three-, four-, or five-star reviews (indicating the product’s manufacturer hasn’t salted the reviews with raves, or if so, enough real people are reporting to give you some facts).

Here’s what I came up with:

GE  Profile

• DWT480RSS: among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Amazon: Interior racks are widely disliked. The top-of-the-line model, which seems to be discontinued, was liked by one consumer who said to avoid lower-end models.
• Elsewhere, complaints of bad customer service.
• High cost; people say they had to replace within a couple of years.
• Consumer Reports likes, but the price is out of sight: over $1200!

Asko DO NOT BUY

• D5122xx1 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• No reviews at Amazon – caution!
• New corporate ownership in 2012 – caution!
• Three hour run time! Holy sh!t. No way to cancel & switch cycles; no low rinse aid indicator.

Kenmore Elite PROBABLY NOT

• Ultra Wash 665.1394 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Extremely poor customer service reported
• MANY bad reviews at Amazon, including motors falling out!! Leaking, not cleaning, flooring destroyed, need for repairs on new machines, bad customer service.

KitchenAid Superba DO NOT BUY

• KUDS30IVSS among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Poor customer service reported
• MANY very bad reviews at Amazon!
• KUDS30FXSS well reviewed at Reviewed.com: excels at cleaning; however, commenters complain about it.
• CAUTION: Kitchenaid is now made by Maytag/Whirlpool.
• To avoid: “The other, more recent KitchenAid is the KDFE454CSS. It costs $50 more than the Bosch, but actually does a worse job at cleaning.”
• Can’t be flush-mounted to cabinets because of heated drying system

Miele: DO NOT BUY

• Not enough reviews on Amazon to tell, but the Crystal Series does not score well.
• Consumer Reports calls it “middling” and prefers the Bosch Ascenta SHX3AR7[5]UC,

Bosch

• Has an A- with Good Housekeeping; in general Americans dislike the no-drying feature
•  Has pretty good reviews at Amazon but not many reviewers. The SHX98M09UC 800 is NOT well-liked. Complaints about odors. Complaints about customer service. One reviewer appears to be stupid, but others seem sane.
• Elsewhere, other complaints about odors (possibly from mold resulting from people leaving dishes sitting in closed washer for several days after running cycle — obviously, if you leave wet dishes in the closed, unvented machine, they’re going to stink). One commenter felt the newer model has dropped so much in quality they would have been better off repairing the old washer.
• Caution: A new feature is a stainless steel tub with a plastic floor!

Looks like the Bosch is the least bad of a mediocre bunch. Planned obsolescence – sometimes leading to breakdowns after just a couple of years – and poor customer service are pretty much universal.  The Kenmore may be pretty good when parts aren’t falling out, but customer service is universally reviled. Lowe’s service is also disliked, by employees as well as consumers. Spencer’s has large numbers of positive reviews but these may be fake, and the nearest store is too far away.

For its astronomical price tag, the Asko brings you a three-hour wash cycle — to my mind the Bosch’s 100-plus-minute cycle is quite long enough.

Sadly, the once-grand KitchenAid seems to have dropped drastically in quality — consumer comments record rant after rant after enraged rant about shoddy construction and shoddy service — probably because it’s now made by Maytag/Whirlpool. I will not buy a Maytag (Whirlpool) product.

The Kenmore, which also used to be a great machine, will bring you Sears’s famously bad customer service, something I really don’t want to deal with. Plus it, too, apparently is suffering with some quality control issues. They recalled a recent model because its motor was falling out onto the floor, flooding the owner’s home — in many cases destroying expensive flooring or leaking through to the basement and wrecking the ceiling there. Unfortunately, they failed to tell the customers about the recall, so many people registering bitter complaints here, there, and everywhere on the Internet were NOT TOLD of the recall! In some cases, people’s insurance would not cover the damage — one consumer is filing a lawsuit against Sears and his home insurance carrier. In other precincts, even those with intact motors leak.

So this leaves us with the Bosch or the GE Profile.

Consumer reviews indicate that the lower-end GE washers are to be avoided, and even the high-end models ($1200+!!) evidently are engineered to crap out quickly. A number of reviewers spoke of major repairs within a couple of years.

The Bosch also may have fallen off some in quality. One consumer remarked that he wished they’d paid to fix their old Bosch, which was a better machine than the one they bought to replace it. This year Bosch has introduced a model with stainless-steel walls but a plastic floor, something to be avoided. If this is a characteristic of the $700-and-less models, it may actually be better to just get the present machine fixed.

Or…not. It makes a perfectly fine, gigantic drying rack for hand-washed dishes.

Dishwashers retain a small pool of water at the bottom to keep a gasket lubricated. But if repairing the thing is not cost-effective and new ones are outrageously expensive and engineered to crap out, then it may be better to shop-vac the mosquito nest out of the Bosch and just resign myself to washing dishes by hand. Or pony up $350 to fix it and hope it runs another year or so.

I really do need to buy a new pool cleaner — Harvey’s hoses are sucking air, never having been replaced during the entire eight or nine years I’ve lived here. A new set of Hayward hoses costs almost as much as the entire unit, so I might as well get a new one: $325 plus almost 10% tax. I can’t afford that on top of a $500 to $800 hit for a dishwasher.

Cleaning the pool manually is one hell of a lot more work than washing a few dishes two or three times a day — and it hurts the spavined back a hell of a lot more than standing in front of the sink long enough to rinse off a few plates and glasses. Given a choice…maybe I’d rather get the pool equipment running right than have an overpriced dishwasher calculated to need replacement in less than seven years.