Banana Bread at High Altitude

As promised, here is a post on baking at high altitude. Baking, unlike most cooking, is chemistry. You have to get the proportions right, and there's not much room for error. Ideally, you'd do everything by weight, but if you use measuring cups you have to level them off with a knife. There's also not much room for improvisation, and many people don't like that aspect of baking. I do, because if you get everything right, you know what you're going to get. I don't make my own recipes, but it's easy to follow the ones that I use. Since the air pressure is lower at high altitude, the chemical processes that occur are affected, so there are certain changes you have to make. I use the King Arthur Flour Guide, and just go with the changes they advise. I've not had a problem. My only caveat would be that with cookies, just use the lowest cooking time listed, and then check in. Remember, you can always cook things for longer, but you can't uncook them.

Here is a loaf of banana bread that I made this weekend, using the guide. It was very, very moist (mostly because I undercooked it slightly; I didn't have a toothpick to test for doneness so I went by sight).

I used a Mark Bittman recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, although I modified it slightly. His calls for coconut or other dried fruit, but whenever I see that in a recipe I mentally replace it with chocolate chips. He also calls for nuts, but Carl doesn't like them. For add-ins like nuts, chocolate chips, etc. you can add however much you'd like. I also added cinnamon. Ingredients listed have not been adjusted for altitude.

Ingredients

• 8 Tbsps (1 stick) butter
• 1.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 0.5 cup whole-wheat flour
• 1 tsp salt (n.b. Despite what I said above about having to be incredibly precise or your baked goods won't come out correctly, I generally don't put as much salt in as most recipes call for. For this, I used slightly under a teaspoon)
• 1.5 tsps baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon (probably could have upped this amount, as it wasn't very cinnamon-y)
• 0.75 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 3 very ripe bananas
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1.25 cups chocolate chips

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease your loaf pan.
2. Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently fold in the vanilla and the chocolate chips.
3. Pour batter into pan, and bake for 45-60 minutes. Test with a toothpick to make sure it comes out clean (although the undercooked bread was still tasty). Let cool for 10-15 minutes, and then pop it out of the pan.

Oven Thermometer

Unless you're a professional chef, you're oven is probably not properly calibrated. Rather than spend a lot of money to get that checked, you can spend $10 and get an oven thermometer. This post is brought to you by the turkey debacle from Thanksgiving, 2008, when we couldn't figure out why the turkey still wasn't finished cooking. I didn't have an oven thermometer at that time. Turns out, when I was living in Irvine, the oven in my condo ran about 50 degrees cool, which meant that if I wanted it at 350F, I'd have to set it to 400F. My oven thermometer helped me figure this out. Mine just hangs on the rack, and I can check it when I'm using the oven and adjust accordingly. Very useful.

High Altitude Cooking

Boulder is 5,430 feet above sea level, so the air is pretty thin. This means all sorts of interesting things happen. I get winded walking up the stairs, and even when it's cold out, if the sun is shining it still feels decently warm. It also means that cooking is affected, since the lower air pressure means that water boils at a lower temperature. There are also consequences for baking, which I'll discuss in a later post. Since water boils at a lower temperature, most things take longer to cook then you would expect. For things like pasta, it's pretty easy to get it right, since you can just taste it every so often. Other things, though, are not so easy. I tried to make a hard boiled egg last night. I boiled the water, put the egg in, and let it sit. Mark Bittman recommends letting it sit for 10 minutes for a perfect hard-boiled egg. Knowing that it would take longer, I kept it in for 13 minutes, and still got a not-quite hard boiled egg. So, if you ever find yourself at altitude, just keep in mind that everything will take longer than you expect it to.

Adventures in Pressure Cooking

The first time I ever encountered a pressure cooker I was in graduate school. So I was at least 22 years old. I suppose I had heard of them before, but I had no idea what they looked like, or how they really worked. I was at my grandmother's house for one of our "Monday Night Dinners," and I tried to open the lid on a pot to see what was in it. Both my grandmother and my uncle started yelling, "Don't open that!" And since then, I've been mildly afraid of the pressure cooker. Despite knowing this, my mom decided to buy me one for Christmas. Monday night, we forgot to soak beans overnight to put in the slow cooker (a Hannukkah present which I'm sure will be discussed). I decided to soak them during the day, and then use the pressure cooker. I read all about how to use the pressure cooker on the internet, and read the directions that came with the pressure cooker thoroughly. That was a bit difficult, since they were poorly translated from German (Keep non-adults and persons away from the pressure cooker). I also have an electric stove, so according to the internet, you have to get it up to pressure on one cooktop on high and then transfer it to another on low, since electric stoves don't change temperature easily (electric stoves are the worst). From start to finish, the whole process took about 30 minutes (not including the soaking). It took a few minutes to get up to pressure, then I kept it on the heat for ~10 minutes, and then 10-15 minutes for it to decompress. The results were pretty good, but I don't think they were consistent. Most of the beans were soft, although there a were a few that I thought were on the firm side. Maybe a few more minutes on heat? Other things to try in the future: steel cut oats and risotto.