Sign in with FacebookTerran's Reviews > Pie in the Sky Successful Baking at High Altitudes: 100 Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Breads, and Pastries Home-tested for Baking at Sea Level, 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, and 10,000 feet (and Anywhere in Between).
Pie in the Sky Successful Baking at High Altitudes: 100 Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Breads, and Pastries Home-tested for Baking at Sea Level, 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, and 10,000 feet (and Anywhere in Between).
by Susan G. Purdy, Dennis Gottlieb
by Susan G. Purdy, Dennis Gottlieb
An excellent and highly analytic cookbook on the oft-neglected art of baking at altitude.
When we moved to New Mexico, and found ourselves at 5000 ft/1500 m of altitude, we suddenly discovered that all of our baking recipes were failing, sometimes quite disastrously. We also discovered that most cookbooks do a poor-to-abysmally-wretched job of discussing altitude adjustments. Even such towering icons of the culinary arts as The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Cake Bible, or The Professional Pastry Chef utterly fail on altitude corrections, giving, at best, some rough rules of thumb and the oh-so-helpful advice "fiddle with it 'til it works".
Yeah, thanks for that.
But Pie in the Sky makes up for all of them. Purdy does a fantastic job of actually testing each of her recipes, not at just one altitude but three or four. She dispels the myth that there are rules of thumb, or that the process is linear with altitude. She gives detailed instructions and analyses on each recipe and the processes that she went through to find each correction. It's a cooking geek's heaven, but it's also accessible if you aren't interested in the chemistry and physics. If you just want to bake your cookies, you can certainly skip the descriptions and cut to the recipe+table of corrections, look up your altitude, and you're off.
Over all, I would mark this book as "indispensable" for bakers who happen not to live within 500 feet of sea level. Considering how many of us there are, you'd think that there would be more on this subject. Thankfully, Purdy provides an informational oasis in the desert of altitude-hating chefs.
When we moved to New Mexico, and found ourselves at 5000 ft/1500 m of altitude, we suddenly discovered that all of our baking recipes were failing, sometimes quite disastrously. We also discovered that most cookbooks do a poor-to-abysmally-wretched job of discussing altitude adjustments. Even such towering icons of the culinary arts as The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Cake Bible, or The Professional Pastry Chef utterly fail on altitude corrections, giving, at best, some rough rules of thumb and the oh-so-helpful advice "fiddle with it 'til it works".
Yeah, thanks for that.
But Pie in the Sky makes up for all of them. Purdy does a fantastic job of actually testing each of her recipes, not at just one altitude but three or four. She dispels the myth that there are rules of thumb, or that the process is linear with altitude. She gives detailed instructions and analyses on each recipe and the processes that she went through to find each correction. It's a cooking geek's heaven, but it's also accessible if you aren't interested in the chemistry and physics. If you just want to bake your cookies, you can certainly skip the descriptions and cut to the recipe+table of corrections, look up your altitude, and you're off.
Over all, I would mark this book as "indispensable" for bakers who happen not to live within 500 feet of sea level. Considering how many of us there are, you'd think that there would be more on this subject. Thankfully, Purdy provides an informational oasis in the desert of altitude-hating chefs.
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