by Many bakers who work at high heights carefully followed a standard recipe to reach into the oven to find a sunken cake, flat cookies or dry muffins.
Experienced mountain bakers know that they need a few tricks to achieve the same results as their craftsmen who work on sea levels.
However, these tricks are more than family tradition. They came in the early 20th century thanks to the examination of Inga Allison’s baking, a professor at Colorado State University. It was Allison’s scientific skills and experiments that made us the opportunity to be perfect brownies and other baked goods at great altitude.
We are two current academics at the CSU, the work of which was affected by Allison’s legacy.
One of us – Caitlin Clark – is still releasing in all -sits lessons a century later in her work as a food scientist in Colorado. The other – Tobi Jacobi – is a scholar of the rhetoric and community writing of women and an enthusiastic home baker in the Rocky Mountains, who learned about Allison and at the same time carried out archive research on women’s work and leadership at the CSU.
This research developed into “knowledge of her knowledge”, an exhibition Jacobi, who developed with Suzanne Faris, a CSU skulpture professor. The exhibition shows dozens of women in 100 years of women’s work and leadership at the CSU and will be exhibited in the CSU Fort Collins Campus Morgan Library until mid -August 2025.
A pioneer in housekeeping
Inga Allison is one of the fascinating and experienced women who are part of the exhibition.
Allison was born in Illinois in 1876 and visited the University of Chicago, where she had completed the prestigious work “Science Course”, which influenced her career. Her studies and research also have the prerequisites for their conviction that the formation of women was more than just preparing for domestic life.
In 1908 Allison was hired as a faculty member in housekeeping at Colorado Agricultural College, which is now CSU. She joined a group of faculties that began to examine the effects of the height on baking and plant growth. The department was located in Guggenheim Hall, a building that was built for the training of housekeeping, but there was no laboratory equipment or serious research materials.
Allison took both the university’s agricultural subsidy mission on teaching, research and expansion as well as their special charges to seriously prepare women for the future. She asked her students to go beyond simple ideas of housekeeping as a mere preparation for domestic life. She wanted her to deal with the physical, biological and social sciences to understand the greater context for the work of housekeeping.
According to the CSU historian James E. Hansen, such thinking in the early 20th century pushed the college students of women to expand the reach of housekeeping to “expansion and welfare, nutrition, institutional management, laboratory research, child development and teaching”.
Allison followed news articles from the early 20th century, which gave lectures such as “the economic side of natural life” to the Colorado Health Club and talk about the women’s clubs and schools throughout Colorado. One of her conversations in 1910 focused on the art of dishwashing.
Allison became the chairman of housekeeping in 1910 and finally Dean. In this leadership role, she asked the then CSU President Charles Lory to finance laboratory materials for the housekeeping department. It took 19 years for this dream to be realized.
In the meantime, Allison worked with Lory, which gave her access to laboratory equipment in the physics department. She put together the equipment to explore the relationship between the cook of food in the water and the atmospheric pressure, but the systematic control of heat, temperature and pressure was difficult to achieve.
She was looking for other ways to carry out a high height experiments and traveled through Colorado, where she worked with students to test the baking of recipes under different conditions, also at 11,797 foot in a shelter in the River Road case near Estes Park.
But Allison realized that recipes that were baked into 5,000 feet in Fort Collins and Denver simply did not work in higher locations. Until 1927 there was few progress in back methods when the first high -altitude baking laboratory in the nation was built on the CSU. The results were tangible and tasty, when the public spread of height-specific back practices began.
A bulletin from 1932 when baking at height offers hundreds of formulas for success at heights of 4,000 feet to over 11,000 feet. The author Marjorie Peterson, housekeeping employee at the Colorado Experiment Station, attributes Allison for her constructive suggestions and support in the development of the brochure.
Science of high baking
As a senior food scientist in a mountain state, one of us – Caitlin Clark – advises bakers on how to adapt their recipes to compensate for the amount. Thanks to Allison’s research, bakers at great altitude can predict how the lower air pressure affects its recipes and will compensate for by small adjustments.
The first thing you need to understand before you go to the kitchen is that the higher the height, the lower the air pressure. This lower pressure has chemical and physical effects on baking.
Air pressure is a force that pushes all molecules back in a system and prevents them from venturing into the environment. Warmth plays the opposite role – it adds energy and presses molecules to escape.
When water is cooked, molecules escape by turning into steam. The less air pressure pushes back, the less energy is required so that this happens. For this reason, water cooks at lower temperatures at higher heights – about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver compared to 212 f at sea level.
So if the baking takes place at great altitude, steam is generated at a lower temperature and earlier in the baking time. Carbon dioxide created by sourdough ingredients also expands faster in the thinner air. As a result, baked goods increase too soon before their structure has been completely set, which leads to collapsed cakes and flat muffins. Finally, the rapid evaporation of water leads to over concentration of sugar and fats in the recipe, which can lead to pastries that a rubber -like, unwanted texture.
Allison learned that the bakers could adapt to their environment by reducing the amount of sugar or increasing liquids to prevent over concentration, and use fewer sourdough agents such as baking powder or baking powder to prevent dough from increasing too quickly.
Allison was one of many groundbreaking women in the early 20th century who actively supported university education for women and advanced research in science, politics, humanities and education in Colorado.
Others were Grace Espy-Patton, professor of English and sociology at the CSU from 1885 to 1896, who founded an early feminist magazine and was the first woman to register in Fort Collins. Miriam Palmer was a aphid specialist and master illustrator, whose work made it possible in the early 1900s to create hyperrealistic waxed apples that were able to confirm the rediscovery of the lost Colorado Orange Apple, a fruit that has been successfully propagated in recent years.
[1945zogalisonsowohlalsemeritterterprofessoralsaSaucelterstu-SuzuSuSiTreatsentofratsratsratsratsratschedeschündierolledeschülerandacceptance-lessonandbiochemicallanguage[1945zogAllisonsowohlalsemeritierterProfessoralsauchemeritierterDekananderCSUzurückSietratsofortindieRolledesSchülerseinundnahmUnterrichtinrussischerundbiochemischerSpracheein
In the fall of 1958, the CSU opened a new dormitory for women, which was called Allison Hall in their honor.
“I had assumed that something like that only happened with the very rich or the very dead,” Allison told reporters at the inauguration ceremony.
Read more of our stories about Colorado.
This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University and Caitlin Clark, Colorado State University
Read more:
The authors do not work for a company or an organization that benefits from this article and have not published any relevant affiliations about their academic appointment.
