High Altitude Baking — All your questions answered
High Altitude Baking — All your questions answered
This text is an excerpt from the book, Pie in the Sky, by Susan G. Purdy
Many bakers believe that boxed or pre-packaged mixes will work at high altitude because they have special high altitude instructions on the packages. In fact, the instructions have limitations and do not always work! Read the altitude instructions carefully. Most boxes say the adjustments work “over 3,500 feet”, or in some cases “for 3500 to 6,500 feet”. But if you are trying to bake at 7000 feet, forget it!
In PIE IN THE SKY, author Susan G. Purdy tested mixes at 5 altitudes. In general, she found that they worked well through 5,000 feet. Above that, cakes stuck to pans, fell or cratered in the center, and had dry texture. The fix is simple: change the pan preparation to include lining with baking parchment or wax paper, and adjust ingredients. Depending on the altitude and humidity, you need to add a little more flour and liquid to the batter. In some cases, it helps to increase baking time as well. For a detailed account of altitude tests and specific remedies, see PIE IN THE SKY, page 317.
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“The national trend toward down-to-earth cooking is all well and good, but where does that leave the millions of people who live at altitudes of 2,500 feet or above? Most cookbooks simply address the challenges of baking in thinner, drier air with a few one-height-fits-all platitudes: “substitute bigger eggs...raise the oven temperature.
But baking teacher and cookbook author Susan G. Purdy chose 100 classic recipes...(and) spent 5 years testing the recipes in home kitchens around the country...She found that some of the conventional wisdom (was) full of hot air. “Those rules were set up by someone with a slide rule,” she says. “I wanted to make baking portable – if you have an RV and want to go from the beach to the top of the mountain, this book will enable you to bake your brownies everywhere and leave a trail of crumbs all the way to the top.”
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