Gather ’round all you clowns.

Create lovely hot beverages! Use simple ingredients! Requires simple tools! Here’s a list of the few items you need:

- A device that produces steam
- Some way to control the steam output
- A stainless steel milk pitcher
- Several clean towels
- An hour or two of undisturbed study
- Three or four 8-ounce clear glasses
- Some food coloring
- Five or six gallons of milk
- Optional (but strongly recommended) thermometer
- Optional (but highly desirable) carton of cream or half ’n’ half

You can heat milk carefully in a microwave or by stirring it constantly in a pan on top of a stove. For efficiency, speed, texture, and taste nothing beats steam heating. And nothing beats an espresso machine for this operation.

Steamed milk definitely tastes better than milk heated any other way. It is sweeter because your tongue reacts instantly to the decreased surface tension. Steaming the milk can be a drudge or one step on your path to culinary glory. It’s serious chemistry, too. In addition to violently and rapidly heating the liquid, steam alters the physical characteristics of milk proteins in a process called denaturing. Changes are taking place on a molecular level in the milk but the results are cosmic. And, of far more interest to you and me, steam-denatured milk can become something quite fascinating — something cold milk simply cannot. Steamed milk can be inflated, built up into a swollen, lofty lattice. That is, it can be turned into an extraordinarily cool thing: foam.