Cooking at altitude.

It's not something you necessarily think about when moving house,  but when your bread dough (sometimes) doesn't rise or your jam takes forever to reach setting point, that's when you start to look into the problems and hopefully find some answers!

We were given a pressure cooker for a wedding present,  now no longer holding pressure unfortunately, but very good as a large stockpot / pickle and jam maker. (We have a new one, a gift from the bank..!)   But the original handbook is still in use and at the very beginning it says "if you live higher than 600m above sea level, adjust your cooking time in the following way....low pressure changes to medium, medium becomes high and for high pressure, add 1 minute cooking time for every 300m above 600."   What I didn't know was that boiling point got  lower the higher you went.....

So today when I started the red grape jelly, I knew that it would take a while longer than the recipe said to reach setting point.  In all fairness the recipe didn't actually say how long, but I bet they didn't think it'd take 1.5 hours!!!!!   I was beginning to think we'd not have anything left to put in jars, but have 8 beautiful dark red jars of jelly cooling in the kitchen.

I started with 3 bunches of grapes that weighed in at 2.7 kgs  ..... cooked for 3 minutes at high pressure with minimal water,  mashed then strained and that produced 4 pints of grape juice.  Added 4 lbs sugar and lots of boiling and stirring later we have 8 jars of jelly to add to the produce shelves in the kitchen.


I did a google search some time ago and found a 'cooking at altitude' website, so if there's anyone else out there wondering why the bread doesn't rise when it's humid  or  you're living high up,  that's the place to look for answers.

And don't get me started on dumplings...... never had a problem until we came here, but it's all in the size  -  small is good -   and a longer cooking time.

Maybe I should start a special section on here!