Milk and tea pots: An experiment in fixing a hairline crack

I drink herbal tea nearly every day. I love it. Typically, I keep the process simple: 90 seconds in the microwave, tea bag in the hot water, let it seep for 5 minutes, sip cautiously until it no longer burns your tongue, then drink with abandon.  But one day I decided to be a little fancier. I decided I would heat the water in the tea pot I received as a gift from a friend.

Gifted tea pot. So cute, no?

I like to blame my next decision on the fact that I have two ceramic pots that do just fine over direct heat. These pots do not, in fact, make alarmingly loud popping sounds approximately 8 seconds after you place the pot on the stove causing you to panic and grab the pot off the burner and groan aloud because you see that, yes, yes you did just crack your little pot by placing it over direct heat.

Clearly this little tea pot is not like those two ceramic pots. Rather, direct heat causes this cute little thing to develop a hairline crack. This is, according to Will, the norm for ceramic things; my two non-cracking pots are apparently quite special and have other materials to help them manage the heat. (Late edit per Will's request: the "other materials" include cast iron.)

Anyway–sorry, little tea pot. My bad.

Hairline crack #1, right along the bottom of the pot.

Hairline crack #2, continuing to the other side of the pot.

I was sad for a few weeks about the ruined pot. It could still hold some water, in a sense, but the water would begin to bubble and trickle through the crack, searching for any sort of escape route. The tea pot was useless, but I didn't want to throw it away. Then, by chance or by a stroke of inspiration, I googled how to repair a tea pot and ran across some claims that heating a tea pot in milk can seal off small hairline cracks. Supposedly, as the ceramic material expands in the heat the warm milk can slip into the crack and then, as both the pot and the milk cool, the protein or some other part of the milk acts as a bond. I ran the idea by Will and he agreed it was worth a try.

The process is quite simple. Place tea pot in slow cooker (or in a pot on the stove, but I was a little gun shy about that option at this point). Add enough milk to cover tea pot. Heat for a few hours. Let it cool over night. Rinse old, gummy milk from tea pot and test the crack. Realize it actually worked! Feel very self satisfied.

The milk developed a strange film over the pot, making it look somewhat otherworldly. Loch Ness Tea Pot.

And it's still working, weeks after the repair. I tested it again today. I added some water and let it sit  for an hour or two, to see if the bond had weakened. So far, so good! Not even one little bubble or trickle has escaped through the crack (which is still visible, but is sealed off).

Lesson #1: Do not heat ceramic tea pot on the stove! (But I'm sure you all already know this since apparently that's common knowledge, unless you are like me and have a skewed sense of what's normal for ceramic kitchenware...)

Lesson #2: Warm milk is glorious! It can correct all kinds of harebrained ideas.

• Decide to go running when the temperature is in the single digits, leading to a sense of being frozen and depleted of energy? No problem. Heat some milk, add some cocoa and be back to normal. (For real, I've heard chocolate milk is one of the best things for women to drink after intense exercise to replenish the calcium in the bones and energy in the body) 
• Decide to make saag paneer but don't want to spend loads of money on a small block of paneer? No problem. Heat some milk, add some lemon, and make some paneer. 
• Crack your own tea pot?! No problem. Warm milk has you covered.