A new hobby for a new year

by Kris Neri

I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but I’ve never been much of a baker. Not only do we not eat many desserts in our house, it seems to require more precision than my cooking style lends itself to. I’m more the “let’s throw in something extra and see what happens” type. Often that’s a function of what groceries we actually have on hand. I suspect most desserts don’t benefit from replacing sugar with onions. 

Making it even more difficult, we live at altitude, which comes with a whole different set of challenges.

Despite having lived here for eight years, since I’m also someone who avoids needless difficulty, I’ve mostly managed not to learn anything about what that demands.

Altitude does impact cooking, too, but only in the sense that the average gas stove will require an extra eternity or two to do everything. With the original stove that came with our house, we soon learned that if we required boiling water, we needed to start a day earlier to make that happen. Once we replaced it with a stove that has power burners and a convection oven, we pretty much came up to standard speed.

But combine altitude with precision, and baking, I’ve found during my occasional attempts, rarely works exactly as it should.

Sure, I know — Google has made our lives easier. It has put all the information in the world at our fingertips and nicely arranges it for us. However, that doesn’t necessarily make all that info accurate. The problem when it comes to the adaptations necessary to bake at altitude, are that the advice is all over the place. Some sources will insist that altitude demands more flour, while others maintain it’s less. Same with liquid, and about everything else you might put into a concoction.

Even worse, the exact altitude will have just as great an impact. Three thousand feet above sea level is not the same as eight thousand. They each have to function with their own parameters, as do the various points in between. Making this even more special, there’s just as much adaptation misinformation and confusion in this area of altitude baking.

What if you don’t want to invest the rest of your life into figuring it out?

But I also heard from multiple people that baking really good bread is easy and fun. I’m all about easy and fun. Best of all, unlike other forms of baking, yeast breads are incredibly forgiving — I have yet to figure out what it would take to wreck a loaf, except maybe forgetting to take it out of the oven.

I did invest a little time in sorting through the altitude advice jungle. I gave up on the more-and-
simultaneously-less conundrum, and just assumed I was on my own there. But as I said, you can’t seem to get that too wrong -- assuming you can form it into a loaf, it always bakes up beautifully. But I did learn more accurately that altitude baking does require less yeast, and slower rises, and more of them, or the bread will be too dry.

Amazingly, that dovetails beautifully with the types of artisan breads that we love.

So, I’ve started baking bread, and it is as easy and fun as I’ve heard. It makes the house smell wonderfully homey. If you have anger issues, you get to punch something that revels in being punched down. And best of all, I’ve discovered that anyone can make great bread, even total non-bakers used to thinking at altitude.

What new hobbies have you begun in this new year? 

Comments

[Patricia Winton]

Kris, you can wreck a batch of yeast bread by forgetting about it during its rise. If the yeast uses all its energy during the rising stage, it won't rise in the oven. That said, it takes several hours of over-rising for that to happen. Enjoy your new hobby. I've been baking bread since I was a teenager, and I still find it satisfying.

[krisneri]

Patricia, I didn't know that, and it's good to know. They really balloon at altitude, too. You're lucky you live in a place where it's easy to buy great bread, as well. Increasingly, we have more and more artisan breads available, but much of what is sold here as bread tastes like cardboard. Having discovered how easy it is to bake break allows me to sidestep that. Thanks for the good info.