I didn’t understand — I followed the recipe exactly as I had for the past 30 years. My shortbread always turned out picture perfect. But when I reached into the oven and removed the pan, I heard a shocked voice behind me uttering, “I thought you did this for a living?” 

I looked at my sheet pan. It was one giant piece of shortbread. I backed away from the oven slowly, head bowed, mortified. 

After a career as a pastry chef and restaurant owner, I moved from Los Angeles to Truckee two years ago. “Up here,” as I say, thousands of feet above my sea-level experience, I learned that high altitude baking was a whole new ballgame.

So, I started asking my new neighbors and friends if they had ever experienced such disasters when baking at high altitude.

It turns out they had, and they shared their stories and their secrets. I saw perfect sourdough baked in the Bay Area that just didn’t work up here. I saw brownies that collapsed in the middle. I saw cheesecake as dry as halvah. 

I was sorry for their missteps but thrilled to learn I wasn’t alone — and that I no longer had to carry the shame from that glob of shortbread. A bond was created, and the Truckee High Altitude Baking Club was born. 

Our mission? To learn the science behind converting “down below” recipes into their best high-altitude version. And for me, it was a push to convert my own professional recipes to be mountain worthy as well.

We meet monthly and text wildly the weekend before, providing real time help like that of the Butterball Turkey hotline at Thanksgiving.

Meeting days are like the Pillsbury Bake-Off — men and women marching in unison to the front door, heads held high, carrying their masterpieces in plastic dessert carriers. Once inside, we sit, taste, comment, and learn from each other. The emphasis is not just to drink coffee and compliment every item, but to be truthful; and if someone’s cake is dry as a dog bone, we laugh together and address it while discussing how to create a moister version.   

We’re grateful that ingredients are donated by various companies such as King Arthur Baking Company, Tahitian Gold Vanilla Company, Melissa’s Produce, and Olive Nation. We try them out and have a good time doing it. 

(The only rule to follow for anyone who wants to attend one of our meetings? What isn’t eaten on site must leave the premises!)

Our “learning food hub” consists of local residents with home baking skills who are willing to share their knowledge, recipes, and experiences of baking successes and failures. Contributors have included locals like Deb Wendell of Edible Art Tahoe, who taught us cake decorating tricks. And our community is augmented by a range of talents across the country who share via Zoom — such as Mimi Council, author of the cookbook The Mountain Baker, and Nancy Goodman Iland of FoodArt LA who educated us all about food styling. 

Upcoming events featuring local talent include a cell phone food photography class with Scott Thompson of Scott Shots Photo, a sourdough class with a super talented local bread baker of many years, and a field trip to Tahoe Oil & Spice for an olive oil tasting.

In the future, we plan to rent a kitchen for classes with local residents and to also write a collaborative community cookbook. Due to the high cost of baking ingredients, a baking ingredients co-op has been discussed, and we are open to ideas and whatever else may come our way too. As long as it is about learning and baking at high altitude (as well as cooking and other areas of food), our developing food collaborative is inclined to say yes.

A recent Truckee High Altitude Baking Club meeting delved into biscotti. 

If you have ever made biscotti, you know there are quite a few steps. Adding in “the science” to my sea-level recipe, it took me a total of six times with six different versions to get to the point where I no longer laid awake at night wondering whether it would work at altitude or not. Should I try using shortening instead of butter? What about brown sugar instead of white granulated?

In addition to my original sea-level version (which came out as hard as a rock), I ended up making two versions using only vegetable oil, two using only butter, and one with half butter and half vegetable oil.

So, what have I learned? 

In a nutshell: baking up here is a sliding scale of more flour, more moisture, less sugar, less fat, and less leavening. And adjusting and adjusting and adjusting the oven temperature. And, remaining calm. 

More biscotti specifics:
• At high altitude, the moisture in butter evaporates more quickly than oil because of its water content in a low-pressure environment. Higher-quality butters have more fat and less water, so don’t get cheap with your butter. I recommend the Amish Butter sold at Safeway.

• Vegetable oil works better than butter, creating a moister product because there is no evaporation; the oil tends to spread more, but still provides an excellent result.

• The best way to prevent spreading is to freeze your log before baking. (Tip: Also consider freezing your cookies and scones before baking.)

• As sugar concentrates, it can create over-caramelizing — so double-pan to avoid burning the bottom of the loaf.

• The time to pull your biscotti from the oven is when it is baked toward the outsides but still spongy in the middle. It will continue to bake once removed from the oven.

Should your version come out a bit hard, you can always eat it the way it was originally designed — dipping in tea or coffee to soften it up.

The next recipe the Truckee High Altitude Baking Club will tackle? Focaccia.

~ Liz Thompson has spent over 30 years in the culinary world as a pastry chef and restaurant owner, focusing on recipe- and new-product development. For more information on recipes, upcoming events, or if you have a talent or tip you would like share, visit the contact page at truckeehighaltitudebakingclub.com