I live at altitude—around 5600 feet, to be exact. Altitude has a lot of effects, including thinner air, brighter sunshine, and (apparently) a greater tendency toward suicide. However, one area of life where altitude has a very pronounced effect is cooking. Atmospheric pressure decreases as altitude increases, and that fact turns out to screw with some of the most basic aspects of food prep.

There is, for example, the fact that almost every bag of food you buy at the grocery store is inflated, so that a bag of, say, Doritos looks sort of like a Doritos balloon. This inflation is the result of transporting sealed goods manufactured at lower altitudes to higher altitudes. The lower atmospheric pressure outside the bag allows the air in the bag to expand. The balloon effect doesn’t hurt the food, of course, and I like to think it even provides a little extra protection for your potato chips, but it’s unsettling to say the least.

I’m not a baker, so some of the most notorious altitude effects don’t get to me, but baking around here requires adjustments in both ingredients and cooking time. The decreased atmospheric pressure means that your breads and cakes can rise higher, which, in turn, means that they’ll collapse unless there’s extra flour to provide more structure. The combination of altitude and very low humidity can also doom your cookies, particularly delicate ones.

The altitude effect that hits me most directly, however, is the simple fact that lower atmospheric pressure means that water boils at a lower temperature. So what, you say? Try boiling spaghetti for the same length of time you do in, say, San Antonio, and you’ll have spaghetti that’s very, very al dente. Pasta actually isn’t a problem, although the increased cooking time can be an annoyance—you can just fish a strand of spaghetti out of the boiling water and taste it to see if the stuff is cooked enough. No, the real problem comes with something like rice or beans. You end up cooking rice like spaghetti: in a large pot of boiling water. Cook the rice that way and it will end up soft, although you’ll still have to cook if for longer than you’re used to. Cook the rice the low altitude way—carefully measuring water and letting the rice absorb the moisture—and you’ll probably end up with the same very, very al dente rice.

And then there are beans. I think the thing that finally drove me over the edge with bean cookery was when I tried making black bean soup in my slow cooker. I soaked the beans overnight and then cooked them for eight hours in the slow cooker, the smell of long-cooked bean soup driving me slowly mad with hunger. Then I served up a couple of bowls for the hubs and myself. And bit into beans that were very, very al dente.

I bought a pressure cooker then because I’d heard Jacques Pepin (whose daughter Claudine lives in Denver) argue that it was the only way to cook beans at altitude. It works, although I’m still learning how to calibrate the thing. The recipe booklet that came with the cooker said to cook beans between five and ten minutes. Nope. Lorna Sass, bless her, has more precise cooking times between twenty and thirty minutes. But even at that length I’ve had mixed success. I’m learning that dried beans differ in their age and that older beans will take much longer to cook. Since I buy a lot of heirloom beans at farmers markets, I can end up with some beans that are overcooked and some that are, once again, very, very al dente.

So cooking at altitude is a challenge. But it’s an interesting challenge. And I’ve come to think of it as part of the whole Colorado gestalt. Outdoor markets, dried beans, and long-boiling pots—we may not be mountain men, but there are times when I think we’re close!