gettin’ high

contact

high altitude baking is a theme you will probably see more and more often in my posts. now that i am working at 8000ft the altitude has a huge effect on most product in the bakery. anyone who has baked in the mountains is well aware of the challenge it brings. i have heard of people that even went as far as to give up baking here because none of their recipes work.

in a nut shell, there is one difference that affects everything, lower air pressure. lower air pressure equals lower boiling point which triggers more evaporation of water, causing sugar to concentrate faster. lower pressure also means everything rises faster, too fast. many baked goods will collapse before they have time to gel. yeasted breads will gain volume before they have time to ferment properly. lower boiling point plus the low humidity create problems as well. baked goods will come out more dry, flour needs more water to hydrate the protein in bread sufficiently and many products can be dehydrated quickly at room temp… not so good if you leave cookies or muffins out.

i am not gonna go much more into how’s and why’s there is plenty of information out there on the subject. there are also plenty of “solutions” to these problems circulating out there as well. many of these solutions are sound in theory but not so simple in reality. over the years i have bounced from low elevation to high, back to low, back to high, low again… you get the idea. after all of this moving around i have found that the guidelines taught on this subject are more witchcraft than fact. my proof is this. i have had many recipes work at sea level and become a train wreck when high up. at the same time i have had many recipes from sea level come out perfect up here. what is funny is that many of the recipes that i used at sea level and needed to adjust for high altitude came out the same when i went back to sea level (using the high altitude recipe at sea level).

this time around i will be approaching the altitude adjustments from a slightly different perspective. i will still be adding and subtracting a little of this or that until the product is correct, but this time i will be paying much closer attention to the ratio of ingredients and finding relationships between ingredients. i am not quite sure how to explain this idea yet hopefully it will become more clear in time.

the project that started this all was sugar cookies. not the crunchy kind but rather the soft ones like snickerdoodles. in the past i always had problems with this cookie because the altitudes effect on items with a high sugar content. traditional high altitude guidelines would tell me something like changing the oven temp and adding some flour, eggs or water and cutting back the leavener would solve my problems. in the end this was partially true.

the question i had was not how to fix the recipe but rather why does one cookie recipe work perfectly with no adjustment and others do not. i started to look at the ratio of ingredients. what percentage of the mix was flour, fat, sugar and eggs. i also looked at the total amount of solid ingredients in the formula as well. the first experiments were with adjusting specific ingredients. one batch adjusted flour and one batch egg. both adjustments added structure and strength to the cookie. the batch with flour probably had a better rise, while the one with egg had a far superior flavor. it was interesting to see how much the flour changed the flavor.

the next test involved changing both the flour and sugar at the same time, trying to find the best of both worlds. again a step forward but did not have quite the oven rise i wanted. the next batch had an increase in leavener. this one was not quite perfect but it made my tasters very happy. It also gave me a little more insight on how all of the pieces fit together and how the basic formula compared to recipes that worked well up here. attached here are my notes and comparisons. it may only make sense to me.

original recipe