Before You Bake Anything
Baking at 4,600 feet without guessing
Let's talk about elevation, because almost nobody does until their cookies come out wrong and they don't know why.
American Fork sits around 4,600 feet. That's not high enough that people think about it the way they would in Park City or up a canyon somewhere, but it's high enough to mess with your baking if you ignore it. Lower air pressure up here means liquids evaporate faster and gasses expand more. Your dough behaves differently than the recipe assumes, especially if that recipe came from a magazine or a website written at sea level, which most of them are.
Here's what that actually looks like in a cookie.
Your dough dries out faster. The recipe says the dough should look a certain way, and yours looks drier than that at the same number of minutes of mixing. That's not you doing it wrong. That's the air here.
Things spread more and rise less than they should. Leaveners react faster in lower pressure, so your rise happens quicker and then it collapses before the structure sets. You end up with a flatter cookie than the picture, even when you did everything else right.
Sugar and butter creaming can trap more air than it should hold. Which sounds like a good problem until the cookie can't support that air once it's in the oven and it deflates.
None of this means the recipe is broken. It means the recipe wasn't written for us.
What I actually do about it
I keep this simple, because I don't want you doing math in your kitchen at 9pm during cookie season.
- Add a little extra flour. Not a lot. An extra tablespoon or two per batch of a standard cookie recipe helps account for the faster moisture loss. I add it gradually and watch the dough, not the recipe.
- Bump your oven temp up slightly, by about 15-25 degrees, and check earlier. Higher heat helps set the structure before the rise collapses. But because it's hotter, your bake time shrinks, so you have to actually watch the cookie, not just set a timer and walk away.
- Chill your dough a little longer than the recipe says. This is the opinion I'll die on in class: most cookie problems are impatience, and up here it's worse, because warm dough spreads faster in dry air. Give it the full chill time, and if you're not sure, give it ten more minutes.
- Watch your liquids. If a recipe has a lot of liquid in it, expect to need slightly less, because it's evaporating out of your dough faster than the recipe writer ever accounted for.
I want to be honest that I don't have a formula that solves this for every recipe. I adjust as I go and I write it down, when I remember to write it down, which is not always. I've re-figured the same cookie twice because I lost the card. So don't feel bad if your first adjustment isn't exactly right. Mine usually aren't either.
A gap I'll admit to you now
I still don't have this fully solved for high-hydration doughs, the wetter ones. Bread I've got dialed in because I obsessed over it for two months with a notebook. Cookies, less so. If a recipe calls for a lot of liquid and I haven't made it before, I expect to make it twice before I trust it.
That's actually something I've been sitting with generally lately, not just about cookies. Eric asked me at a game night a while back whether I actually wanted to finish my preschool certification or just liked having it on my list, and I didn't have a good answer. I think about that more than I expected to. Some things you do because you're actually working toward them, and some things you just keep circling. Elevation adjustment for cookies is one I've actually worked at. The certification is still sitting there. I'm telling you that so you know the difference between "I haven't solved this yet" and "I haven't tried," because they feel similar from the outside and they're not the same thing.
A quick caution
If you're bumping your oven temperature up, stay close to the kitchen for that first batch. A hotter oven with a shorter bake window means the gap between "perfect" and "burnt" gets smaller, not bigger. I'd rather you check at eight minutes and again at nine than trust the timer straight through.
Before next time
Pick one cookie recipe you already know well and write your elevation adjustments right on the recipe card, not in your head. You'll thank yourself in two weeks when you're making it at 10pm and can't remember what you changed.