General kitchen craft, plus a running series on the two things every Santa Fe cook must reckon with: seven thousand feet of altitude and air dry enough to cure jerky on the clothesline.
Lower air pressure means a cooler boil. Pasta takes longer, beans take much longer, and a "3-minute egg" is a sea-level fiction. Build in time, and taste as you go.
Less air pressure means dough balloons quickly and can over-proof before the flavor develops. Cut the yeast by about a quarter and let the dough, not the timer, tell you when.
The classic high-altitude fixes: a touch less sugar and leavening, a touch more liquid, and a slightly hotter oven to set the structure before it over-expands.
With humidity in the teens, flour stored in a Santa Fe pantry is genuinely drier. Doughs and batters often need an extra splash of liquid to look the way the cookbook photo promises.
Desert air is merciless to a cut loaf. Store bread cut-side down on the board, bag what you'll eat tomorrow, and freeze the rest the day you bake it.
A cooler simmer means collagen breaks down more slowly. Give pot roasts and short ribs 25–50% more time — the reward is the same silky result, just later.
The single habit from restaurant reviewing that most improved my cooking: first taste for impression, second taste for what's missing. It's almost always salt or acid.
Read it twice, all the way through, before you turn on a burner. Half of kitchen disasters are really reading disasters — I say this as a former editor.
Restaurant cooks get good by repetition, not repertoire. Pick five dishes you love and cook them until the recipes disappear into your hands.