Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.
I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.
Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.
It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.
It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)
Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.
Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.
Meanwhile, here in Canada I've never seen "sticks of butter", only the large bricks. They're the same size as American ones, and labeled as 454g, but I only recently found out that in some places in the US, they cut them in fours. Before that, the phrase didn't mean anything to me, and I thought it referred to throwing the whole brick in. The smaller 250g packages also exist, but they're rare.
I can't guarantee that the sticks don't exist anywhere, but I've lived in several cities all over the country and I've never spotted anything like that
The 250 g half-bricks are very common. It's how the foo-foo frilly butter is sold ("cultured" butter, imported French butter with 94% fat content, butter made exclusively from milk squeezed from grass-fed cows, etc) because no one is willing to pay $15.00 for a pound of butter but they'll pay $8.00 for a half pound.
I only recently found out that in some places in the US,
they cut them in fours
That's pretty much the standard in the US. It's common enough that there's a bit of an east/west divide as to how the quarters are shaped. When I worked in a grocery store we'd also sell individual quarters (but I never actually saw anyone buy them as such).
Some American butter is wrapped in wax paper as regular sticks with measurement markers on it so that it is easy to measure. Plenty of large bricks though.
I’ve seen them in stores in Canada, but they’re usually more expensive than the 454g blocks. Expensive enough that it’s usually better to buy the block and portion it as needed.
Bricks won't fit in our butter trays. And it'd be an ordeal to open a brick, quarter it, then put the opened 3/4 of the brick back into cold storage until needed again.
Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
Blame the European regulators who decided that it was no longer necessary to have standard pack sizes.
Pack sizes were regulated in 1975 for volume measures (wine, beer, spirits, vinegar, oils, milk, water, and fruit juice) and in 1980 for weights (butter, cheese, salt, sugar, cereals [flour, pasta, rice, prepared cereals], dried fruits and vegetables, coffee, and a number of other things). In 2007, all of that was repealed - and member states were now forbidden from regulating pack sizes!
I think the rationale was that now the unit price (price per unit of measurement) was mandatory to display, consumers would still know which of two different packs on the same shelf was better value. But standard pack sizes don't just provide value-for-money comparisons, as this article shows.
Ironically it seems (from memory, I've not researched it deeply) that continental butter has not changed from 250g, whereas the British brands have moved first to 200g. I could understand if they switched to 225g as essentially a half-pound block, but 200g isn't any closer to an useful Imperial measure than 250g.
Most butter here (and in a number of other countries) have measuring lines on the pack itself in 50g increments, so while I agree with you it's a nuisance to have an open one to deal with, the measurement part is usually a matter of using a knife along the marked line...
If the "certain brands" you refer to don't have those measuring lines, though, then a pox on them...
Pre-salted butter is another weird American thing that's completely unnecessary. Butter is also great for cooking and you can keep it for months in the fridge without issues.
It's not really an American thing. It's a pretty wild mix which regions use which how much all across the world (well, across places that commonly use butter obviously)
Another dimension we have in France: most butter in 82% fat, but if are not careful you might buy so-called butter with much lower fat. Awful taste on morning toasts, ruined pastries.
82% seems the norm here too, good to know this. Anything lower is labelled 'spread' (based on a very quick search, maybe not always true here). Oddly specific, so maybe there's regulation at play. We prefer French butter for the quality and because it comes in the correct size.
The 125 g package tends to be exclusive for more expensive brands though, or special stuff like salted butter. 250 g is the basic European packaging unit of butter, with the occasional 500 g for margarine.
> If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.
Wat. Never in my life have I seen butter in the (mostly western) US sold in anything other than 1/4 lb sticks. There are long, skinny sticks and short, fat sticks, but they're always 1/4 lb. If you say a "pat" of butter, you're getting roughly a 1/2 Tbsp of butter from me. Definitely not half a stick!
Midwest, East Coast, and South I've seen some 1/2lb or 1lb blocks for fancier butters sometimes. But a pat of butter was definitely 1/4-1/2 tbsp of butter in the midwest - depending on if for toast (less) or for baking (exactly 1/2).
I've not heard "pat" used as a serious unit of volume since childhood though. In fact I rarely hear the word pat in relation to butter at all anymore.
I'd say (from northern Europe) that 500 g [1] is a standard pack of butter, even though they've also added the smaller "half packs" of 250 g. For professional use, there's also the full kilogram. Whoa that has got to be expensive these days.
Also the tbsp and fluid ounce differ by 4% in the UK vs USA. This offsets the nominal 25% difference in pints, with UK pints having 20 oz and US pints having 16, closing the gap a bit to an actual 20.095% between the pints.
> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
Implied by the Devil Dog mentioned later in the essay:
> And I will say this for the good folks in Hershey, Pa. It’s still the same damned good chocolate, what’s left of it. A replacement of whole by broken almonds 1s the only compromise with quality I’ve noticed, while I shudder to think what the “‘creme”’ inside a Devil Dog is made of these days.
Thanks for the explanation. Hershey's taste was really a disappointment on my first visit to the US. As a dark chocolate eater I still can't understand how this called chocolate.
My wife worked for a company that does this (for many large brands that you know of. Yes it always surprised me that they even farmed this out, they really only do marketing themselves anymore). Was a real eye opener.
What's even easier than measuring with a kitchen scale is just throwing the entire can in and calling it good. That's often why these recipes used "boxes", "cans", etc as units of measurement in the first place. By converting to standard units you're increasing the amount of effort needed to actually make the dish. It might be more in keeping with the spirit of the recipe to just substitute similarly-sized cans or boxes, even if it's not quite the same taste. It depends on your priorities I suppose. (Though either way it's probably good to include units for the sake of clarity and reproducibility: e.g. "one 16 oz can" rather than "1 can".)
Agreed, I wouldn't say XXXX grams of Hershey's chocolate syrup, but I do want to know what size "a can" means.
On the other hand, for things that you would always measure (or need to do to sizes changing) like flour or sugar, I want that in grams for easy measuring. Even chocolate bars, might be easier to just say how much you need since getting exactly what you are looking for might be difficult/impossible.
RE: finding what "1 can" or "1 bar" was, you may be able to scour archive.org for scans of old magazines and newspapers to see advertisements or product listings for the respective product? At least, that's one route I'd consider
I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids, but even so why not just use ml or weight). When it comes to measuring larger ingredients (e.g. apricots) then the dimensions of this platonic cup come into play and I have to start deriving the optimal (almost) sphere packing to figure out how many apricots to use.
No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing. A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot. The issues surrounding volumetric measurements for dry goods is an entirely separate matter. 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots.
Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones.
One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoons and tablespoons.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.
My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml.
Well there's a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting to go down. I knew that Australian tablespoons (20 mL) were significantly different from US tablespoons. I didn't know that UK tablespoons were a whole different beast (14.2 mL), nor did I realize US tablespoons aren't quite 15 mL, and in fact my tablespoon measures are marked 15 mL. 15 mL is handily 1/16 of a US cup so it's easy enough to translate to 1/4 cup (4 tsbsp) and 1/3 cup (5 tbsp).
> No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing.
I understand that other countries (probably North American ones) use the same system too, so thought I was clarifying, not scaring.
> A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot
I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age. Weighing something in grammes is easy and standardised (for most of the Earth's surface at least). Admittedly, imperial measurements can be problematic as a British pint is different to a U.S. pint and "fluid ounces" also have different definitions.
> 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots
I agree - any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots". I've never seen mL used for measuring whole fruit - grammes would be appropriate for mashed fruit though.
I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of
metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age.
Right, but a cup is not an imperial unit of measure and metric cups didn't really catch on in the UK. So if you're looking at an older British recipe that references cups, good luck.
any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots".
This is also a bad idea as common sizes for certain things change over time (e.g. some of the comments here talking about eggs). I don't eat too many apricots, but apples here can vary in size wildly even of the same variety.
Can't recall seeing any British recipe that uses cups so the difference between imperial and metric cups is irrelevant to us.
At least with something like "5 apricots", it should be obvious to the cook if they've got really small, big or varying sizes. Meanwhile, the "cup" measurement can vary depending on the order of which you put the apricots into the cup - do you put the smallest fruit in first, or the biggest?
One of my favorite dessert recipes is Dorie Greenspan's French Apple Cake. It calls for "4 large apples". The recipe is equally enjoyable with a wide range of apple mass, but the character is definitely changed depending on what you do. I think baking is a lot more flexible than most folks give it credit for, but getting more precise units helps ensure consistency from cook to cook and from batch to batch.
For reference a friend who'd expatriated to the midwest posted something about some giant apples they bought. I replied with a picture of an average apple I bought, roughly twice the size of theirs.
Meanwhile, the "cup" measurement can vary depending on the order of which you
put the apricots into the cup - do you put the smallest fruit in first, or
the biggest?
Sure, volumetric measurements for solids is generally not great which is why when I transcribe recipes for my own collection I tend to weigh things out.
Yep, some recipes don't require precision, but something like a soufflé might.
Weighing things out is the correct method. What could be useful is if recipes provided the ratios of the ingredients along with error margins, so that you could easily type in an amount (e.g. 100g flour) and it'd scale the other ingredients to match. However, maybe that's overthinking it.
No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill".
Old family recipes would just say things like "add flour" and that amount was taught face-to-face and hands-on where you added enough till it looked "right" because onions and eggs etc. were not a uniform size.
This reminds me of a boxed item I bought ages ago where the instructions were basically: cook to desired doneness, season as desired.
Also reminds me of a coworker in a restaurant in Palo Alto who, when I asked him the recipe for a dressing I needed to make, told me "ginger juice, lemon, and just make it good". It turns out there were a few other ingredients.
And yeah, depending on how far back you're going or what sources you're using, there will be a lot of vaguely defined quantities. Glen of Glen and Friends on Youtube regularly cooks vintage recipes and gets into how things evolved over time. Most of his old cookbooks are either Canadian or American but from time to time he cooks from UK cookbooks.
I'm sure there will be examples and my childhood memories won't be great but that link isn't a good example of British recipes.
Most of the instances of "cups" come from the "Edwardian recipes" which is a collection of international recipes including American. It includes in the preface a Table of Measures which is what you do for Brits who see "cup" and ask "what the fuck is that?"!
Note that UK measuring cups are not exactly the same size as US measuring cups, just as US and UK gallons are not the same size. Yes, this is infuriating. Fortunately you can buy US ones over the internet, or convert it into metric like a normal person.
Except there's no such thing as a "volume measurement":
- The so-called "cups" will have different manufacturing processes, some will be a bit smaller, some will be bit larger. Plastic cups will warp and deform with time.
- When measuring dry materials like flour, the amount in your "cup" depends on your usage. Are you weighing sifted flour or flour out of the bag ? Are you accidentally/deliberately compressing the dry goods when using your cup ? (e.g. are you scooping straight from the bag of flour).
- etc. etc. etc.
Just weight the damn ingredients using a scale. There's a reason no professional kitchen in the world uses "cups".
I fully agree that weighing is better, but if you apply your standards to weighing you'll end up concluding there's also no such thing as "weight measurement."
- The so-called "weight" will differ depending on the type of scale and how it's used. People used mechanical kitchen scales just fine even when some measured a bit less and a bit more
- While digital scales can be more accurate, accuracy can still vary, and of course the reported weight can vary depending on where an object is on the scale or how the scale is set up. (Yes, I've used a scale that wasn't on a smooth flat surface. It worked out fine.)
- "Dry materials" like flour are hygroscopic, and even though weighing is better than measuring by volume, you end up weighing the flour + water, when what you want is just the weight of the flour (e.g. you may have to consider the storage history of your flour)
- There's the ~0.4 % weight difference between the equator and the poles.
Yes, these are all very picky, but that's how your "no such thing as" comes across to someone who grew up using volume measurement in the home kitchen.
Instead, simply say that weight measurement results in more reliable and predictable cooking. Perhaps also add that cleanup can be a lot easier when ingredients don't need intermediate staging.
For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate?
It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know?
At least a gram is a gram is a gram everywhere in the world!
Professional kitchens doing environmentally-sensitive cooking are going to have climate controlled areas and tools that make that work. Your kitchen probably doesn't. Many recipes will have wildly varying demands for flour (among other things) based on humidity, ambient temperature, elevation, the water, and the flour being used. Volume estimates end up being more accurate to the process than precise weights.
Often the precise amount doesn't really matter though. Likely it was "one can" to begin with because that's just what was convenient and not because the recipe has been optimized to that size.
I guess it depends how much you care about perfectly reproducing the exact same dish. For personal cooking I usually don't - a bit of variance is not a negative thing.
I recently made an old family recipe for carrot cake, and the cream cheese frosting called for "a box" of confectioners sugar and "a package" of cream cheese.
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people.
It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.
The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.
This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.
I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:
> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process
Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.
By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM
(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)
"Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF." I infer 'IMPish' as meaning 'like Instant Mashed Potato'.
I read that footnote as a somewhat oblique criticism of two LLMs, rather than on the statistic itself - which may indeed have just been fabricated by the LLM as opposed to an actual statistic somehow dredged from its training data, or pulled from a web search.
Really depressing to think that people trust statistics from these models and soon the models will be ingesting statistics they themselves made up as training data.
Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!"
She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.
Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"
She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.
At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.
Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.
I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.
Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.
A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.
Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about.
Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ...
Well also that you can buy graham cracker crumbs, for making things like pie crusts. My friend gave me a weird look when we went shopping and I picked up whole crackers. And then the revelation that graham refers to a type of flour and is not in itself a brand. And Kelloggs sell the crumbs? Wild.
A biscuit base in the UK would usually require a pack of digestives and a rolling pin. I suppose some supermarket sells crumbled biscuits but...
As an aside, Golden Grahams used to be popular in the UK and I don't think anyone stopped to ask what the name meant.
Digestives are a bit thicker, but the ones I had while over there weren't substantially so. You're less likely to get the shared experience of dealing with the goopy mess all over your fingers because your graham is shattering at the first bite.
Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.
I think another option is chocolate 'malted milk' (in the UK) - depending on your preference for ratio of biscuit to chocolate to marshmallow. Leibniz will have more/thicker chocolate, but malted milk will break a bit easier in the mouth (softer/crumblier biscuit).
I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.
But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.
We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.
I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.
If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon.
I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT, and we found the recipe below.
Could you check your cookbook to see if it has a recipe like this, and possibly take a photo and send it to me? Email is in my profile. Thanks!
---
Old-Fashioned Baked Macaroni and Cheese (circa 1950s BH&G style)
Ingredients:
1½ cups elbow macaroni (uncooked)
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk (sometimes evaporated milk was used)
1 tsp salt
Dash of pepper
Optional: breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs for topping
Optional: butter for dotting the top
Instructions:
Cook the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain.
In a large bowl, combine the hot macaroni with most of the grated cheese.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, salt, and pepper.
Pour the egg-milk mixture over the macaroni and cheese, stir gently to combine.
Pour into a buttered casserole dish. Top with the remaining cheese, and optionally a layer of buttered breadcrumbs or crushed crackers.
Bake at 350°F for about 45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned on top.
My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.
I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.
>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
This site [1] has some interesting info:
[1886]
"The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight."
---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67)
With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg).
2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes.
(Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.)
So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.
There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"
> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.
Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.
Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...
If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason.
Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).
If anyone needs to stay in their lane, it is you. Your analogy doesn't work either. I have my build scripting standardized and in version control. You can't change it because you don't have permission. Even if you did, I still have my copy. Your rude attitude is unwelcome.
> You can't change it because you don't have permission.
Well, right! Who gave the upthread commenter permission to rejigger all the recipes? Those are shared traditions, not something individuals are expected to "fix" without shared permission. That they don't happen to be stored in an authenticated and access-controlled medium isn't really part of the moral analysis.
> Your rude attitude is unwelcome.
Honestly I thought it was whimsy, not rudenss. I didn't expect highly paid tech professionals to be so thin-skinned about cooking, so that's on me. Apologies.
But at the same time, and for the same reason, refactoring your great grandparents' received wisdom is also rude, and that's the part here people have trouble with.
The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update.
To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.
"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother.
OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.
> How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature.
It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread.
You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.
You can think they did more damage than good, but if you think they weren't explicitly working to uphold tradition then you didn't read the comment right.
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.
They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.
Familiarity. Many grew up eating the boxed cakes so that is what represents what a cake should taste like. And in my opinion the taste and texture of many boxed cakes is good. Plus the simplicity of adding an egg, some oil and water makes it very appealing to many.
You're on Hacker News. Why put an excess of effort into any nostalgic project? Why try to recapture Windows XP GUI or SNES graphics or try to hack together a classic car that was, by all measurements other than cool factor, inferior to a modern car?
You're replying to a comment that responds to the claim that making cake from scratch is significantly harder than using a commercial cake mix because those contain millions of hard to get ingredients.
If you want to precisely emulate it for the fun of it then more power to you but if you just want a good cake then no you don't need to. Basic flour, baking soda, sugar, cocoa powder, etc. will do the trick just fine.
So you're telling me it takes one update to the recipe of the boxed mix and you can never reproduce your old recipes? Sounds like one should avoid using ready made mixes altogether.
Yes and no. Its usually butter based dough needing to be kneaded finely and left to rest an hour before use, prefferably pre-baked in pan before adding filling for best result.
You can get it quite quick with a food processor or a kitchenaid mixer, but kneading such a dough by hand and having the time to let rest, flatten with a rolling pin and pre-bake in pan, push pie up a bit in the effort ranking.
So i feel there is real value in quickly putting a pre-flattened doough sheet in a pan, especially if some chemistry can skip the pre-bake step.
So i see the appeal much more for this product over pound cake mix which is just four, sugar, egg and leveling agent.
The EU contains about 30% more people than the USA alone. (450MM vs 340MM)
North America overall contains many more people than the EU. (340 + 129 + 40 for just USA, Mexico, Canada, plus another ~50MM in smaller countries. 560ish total)
Is cake mix expensive? Wouldn't powdered milk and egg be cheaper than real eggs? Is it actually more expensive to bake with cake mix than with short shelflife milk and egg?
It depends but cake mixes are brand products and so don't enjoy the same kind of competition that fungible raw ingredients do.
It depends on how much cake you bake though. For many ingredients you'll need less than the smallest packaging size - and much less than packaging sizes that aren't way overpriced.
Can we stop calling things you find weird “American?” Like Jesus Christ, Europe isn’t some special land where everyone makes food from scratch and capitalism doesn’t exist.
I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.
Cake mix is not only an American invention, predominantly sold by American companies (even in the European market), featuring traditionally American baked goods. (Pound cake, brownies and chocolate chip)
Looking for cake mix history in sweden descibe its initial import from USA and England as American style cookies and brownies became popular.
Its American association is well founded. And i did not use the word wierd. I simply pointed out that this ubiquity of "cake mix" baked goods is not reflected in my experience, and may be more concentrated in USA.
In particular in take issue with phrasing cake mix as "family recipe" as even the brands i can find at my store are younger than one generation, and has nowhere near the cultural footprint that they seem to have in USA.
I use poundcake as a synonym to spongecake. The ingredients and process are the same, with variations large enough between recipes to accommodate both. (Cupcake, chocolate cake, lemom cake, some apple cakes all use the same basic dough composition too)
Poundcake vary greatly beyond a "pound".
If anything, spongecake is more strictly defined, originally not using leveling agents, relying on the air bubbles introduced in the beating of the eggs.
But thats semantics. Perhaps spongecake is more recognised as the umbrella term.
Going by first use by the term, poundcake would be British by about 30 years prior to the influential book American cookery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Cookery). But modern poundcake also relies on the american invention of "double acting baking powder".
>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.
Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.
I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...
But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.
Surfactants/emulsifiers, from that list, have been connected to leaky gut ('emulsifying' protective mucus) which causes inflammation. This is hypothesized to be one of the mechanisms by which ultra-processed food causes a constellation of diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome
Thank you, I'd not read it was a myth before and had confused it with another condition 'worsening allergy symptoms due to the effects of alcohol'.
Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms.
My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
"Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear.
I'd much rather eat a cake that has the texture of a cake rather than some food science abomination. It's corporations that have taught you to desire the wrong definition of a cake.
Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things.
Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal.
> If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better.
If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas.
Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch.
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests. Very few bakers short of folks with a lot of volume are doing stuff from scratch.
It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one.
The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
Don't neglect the cultural component when considering taste tests. I've heard there are many americans who actually prefer american chocolate. To me it tastes like sugary beeswax with a hint of sock.
I wonder what is the proportion of that according to countries. In France, there's a label "fait maison" that's supposed to limit how much the baker or restaurateur rely on pre made mix. But besides this if a professional baker uses a premade mix, how do they differentiate themselves (but then I guess from my experience in the US some shops mostly compete on decoration and not taste)
> Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests.
Could be a "New Coke"[1] thing, where people just like the one with more sugar. There's a reason food companies pack the stuff into everything - it (usually) works.
> It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.
If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
> The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
95% of bakeries are using a box mix and a packet of jello pudding. That's the secret.
Ability to cook is a spectrum. In order for your statement to be true, then the average cook must be 'almost always' better at producing cake than the average bake mix.
> Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch.
Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum.
> Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise
It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining.
> To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience
Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting.
About the taste of things:
When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit.
I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor".
Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap.
> Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives
Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.
My Beppe's (Frisian grandmother) boterkoek (butter cake) was a well-loved staple at church and school bake sales. She closely guarded her recipe, but shared it with my eldest sister who, after she died, told me that she actually used margarine instead of butter in her recipe. Everyone, not even just her family, loved her boterkoek, and yet it didn't even have butter in it.
My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.
Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique.
Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that.
If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really.
Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
What I am calling snobby is to look down on grandma's cooking because she used processed foods. Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking. In the US Midwest a tradition is to use a box cake mix as a base and add to it flavorful additions, like homemade jams, fruits, whipped cream, etc. If I went to someone's house and their grandma served to me, it would be extremely snobbish to think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is".
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
It’s a class/geographical thing. In my early childhood in a fancy suburb of a big city, my parents and people in their social circle used mixes 0% of the time, but when we moved to a smaller town it was way more common.
This matters when you are trying to sell a product, not so much when you are cooking for friends and family as long as you get into the ballpark which isn't really that hard. Little variances and surprises just make home cooking more interesting.
I am loving this thread, and how cake is suddenly up there as a controversial, polarising topic.
Respect for working in a bakery, just hope you haven't got too many burn scars on your forearms from doing long night shifts. I am in broad agreement with you and I appreciate the difficulties of making a consistent product, particularly when there are variables in temperature, seasonal availability of ingredients, lots of machinery to keep running and workers that are probably taking a bit more than cake to see their shifts through.
In the UK, as far a cakes are concerned, you either have a 'bought one' or something you make from scratch yourself. There is no in-between and a cake mix would be frowned on by middle class snobs as 'having cheated'. Or, failing that, taken as an insult. A 'bought one' would be entirely understandable, and what you might expect for birthday celebrations, at home or in the workplace. But a cake mix?
A home made cake is 'proof of work' and the use of a cake mix just undermines it. Approximately the same amount of time is spent in the kitchen and the oven is on for the same amount of time, plus there is the same amount of washing up.
Advertising these processed foods started a lot earlier in America than anywhere else. There are geographical challenges that make this understandable. But, over time, the food companies coalesced into a dozen gigantic mega-corporations and brands that once stood for quality and no adulterated ingredients (from the days before the FDA) now stand for adulterated ingredients.
In the UK we used to have Quaker owned confectionery companies such as Cadburys where the original product was all about health, happy workers and all these good things. They automated processes because they were ideologically against slavery. But, generations on, with the likes of Cadburys owned by the likes of Kraft or Nestle, it isn't like that. The milk and cocoa content goes down, the sugar and palm oil goes up. The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
Back to stupid British snobbery, I would prefer one of your mass-made cakes any day over something that has been made by a snobby Brit as the 'ultimate in cake', where you can't just enjoy it, you have to express to the baker that every mouthful is like the greatest, most orgasmic experience in the history of the universe, for which you are eternally grateful. In these scenarios, you daren't wolf the cake down as that would be disrespectful, and you daren't ask for anything more than the thinnest slice since any more would be deemed greedy.
> None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
If the US can make you pay the income tax difference when living abroad then I fail to see why we can't do the same for companies using these kinds of schemes.
I think in the UK “shop bought cake” and “home made cake” are basically 2 different things that look kind of similar.
Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a distinctive taste and texture which I really don’t like. If I made a cake at home and it ended up tasting like something from the supermarket I’d consider it a failure.
> The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
This part interests me. I have no idea what seals of approval are worthwhile or not. I just see that they are printed on the package and assume it counts for something. Is there some controversy relater to cocoa in this case?
Cocoa/chocolate is an industry that happens to use a fair bit of child slavery, unfortunately (among other bad practices, I just single out that one because it's the one that I consider the most abhorrent)
Getting a fair trade certification requires a supply chain inspection, and in theory, would not be possible to get for producers which have child slavery in the supply chain. Though of course, supply chain inspections are complicated and I believe this is by no means perfect (nothing is).
Rainforest Alliance certified has nothing to do with ethics in treatment of the humans involved in the supply chain, just environmental impact.
> None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if all the Starbuckses disappeared?
Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)
Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
Just to push back on this slightly, I'm sure I've watched Youtube videos with someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking.
As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting.
This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
> someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking.
Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.
> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker
Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
Do you have an example of these unreachable ingredients? The main ones - dextrose, whey, emulsifiers - can be found at any supermarket as "bread improver" or "dough conditioner" mix.
Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
So someone who is used to industrialized cake baking prefers industrialized cake recipes? What exactly do you think this means about the quality of cake you can bake from scratch at home? Do you really need a cake expert to tell you what cake is good??
Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe?
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
> Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
Dude, that's a conspiracy theory website that is all about UFOs and not getting vaccinated. You are wasting everyone's time by posting this link.
Most of the world's agriculture concerns growing commodity crops to feed animals - 'big beef'. This is big business and the source of all hatchet jobs on Ancel Keys. Their message is simple, you don't need fruit and vegetables, you need steak and butter!
Find me one centenarian that got there by eating a diet heavy in saturated fats. Just one!!!
Your comment makes as much sense as "Tobacco is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile coal fires are as bad or even worse than people think it is."
If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.
If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.
But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.
Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
> Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.
That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? Something tells me this is about that bias people have, the one where long chemical names are all bad, because they're chemicals, and the only good chemicals one may use is ones that are common enough to receive a non-intimidating normal name. It's all chemistry all the way down.
If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor.
Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.
Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
It's cheaper and nicer to buy from simple graineries than from some faceless megacorp that's probably just Nestle, that's shrinking your boxes and not telling you as if you're a moron and can't tell.
Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.
I'm not sure about the fat reduced cocoa, for all I know that might just be what I think of as normal cocoa powder, and the rest are just regular ingredients anyone would use. No fancy surfactants and powdered fats etc.
But then there is even less point in buying the branded mix rather than individual ingredients that you can use for various recipes with ratios that you like.
The point is that I can make brownies, rolls, whatever I please without having a cupboard full of all kinds of crap like flour, sugar, cocoa etc that attracts bugs and expires and so on.
I buy one bag that's dirt cheap and has everything I need including instructions. And it just has the same stuff I would be using anyway so there's no downside. No scary ingredients. Just freshly baked goods on demand.
What I'm learning is that some people don't keep a stock of what I would consider "bare minimums" in their cupboard.
First of all, properly stored flour, sugar, and cocoa powder doesn't attract bugs. Glass jars that seal well, done. Hell even plastic tubs. It expires pretty rarely as well, surely you can just bang out a couple of loaves of bread before that happens?
Anyway, yeah, is it not like, a very normal thing to keep flour, sugar, baking soda, cocoa powder, salt, perhaps yeast on hand? Butter, oil, some pasta, maybe some rice? Like, how do you cook otherwise, just buy small batches of these things every time?
> That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
My point was that these added ingredients aren't special space magic, they all have a purpose and that purpose is something home bakers can often replicate with simple ingredients.
I'm refuting the notion that it's impossible to best the box because of the exotic ingredients.
I make no claim as to whether box vs common ingredients are better/healthier/etc. They are what they are.
> That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason?
I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear.
Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.
If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
> I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I don't think so. bruce511 was replying to a completely different part of the ancestor comment, disliking the list of chemicals regardless of whether they do something unique, and tavavex was rebutting a dislike of chemicals.
> Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.
> If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
I don't understand what you mean by "dismissal". When I'm "dismissing" them it is in the context of "you don't need these to make delicious cakes competitive with the box goods." And the reason I'm dismissing is because of availability to a home cook.
It's fair to point out the parent comment was talking about the fear of chemicals in the foods, not a concern I share. I was more writing in terms of whether or not you actually need these ingredients to be successful baking.
I'd further say that, especially with food, there's no strict "bad/good". The ingredients are simply different. While it does impact the final outcome, you likely won't taste much difference if you used canola oil or corn oil in a recipe, for example. Does that make corn or canola bad/good? No, they are just different ingredients that accomplish the same goal. With that in mind, availability becomes a much more important thing to consider. So I can dismiss the need for xanthan gum for a home cook because I know that potato starch will fill the same role while being easy to find in the store. It's more available, not better.
I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.
I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners.
My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.
We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.
> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie
They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.
They could just sell the full package like they used to before if they don't want to change the packaging. The entire point of reducing the content is to mislead the consumer into not noticing a price increase.
You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air.
But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag.
This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
I think that's a known quantity. Only a child would think a bag of chips is completely filled with chips. In fact, I remember first hearing about this in some science show or something; it hadn't occurred to me before then that the bags were mostly empty, it was just the way chips were packaged.
>If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break.
Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?
Complain about feeling ripped off? Absolutely. I don't buy chips much, but skin care products are the worst offenders, with both the box and the container inside having extra space to make it look like more product than it has. I don't make complaining about this my whole identity, but I have complained about items with excessive amount of air in the container whenever I've received one.
I was asking specifically about chips and the like. I've seen that shit you mention in creams and pastes and other stuff like that and yeah, that's definitely deceitful and nobody likes that. That said, for me it's not about getting ripped off, but about making it difficult to tell when I'm about to run out, especially if it's some specialty product that I have to go out of my way to get.
"Companies don't use packaging to fool consumers" is not something that you can deduce from "some customers are confused about a specific kind of packaging".
And even for chips, "bag of air" isn't the only viable packaging method. Of course others aren't without tradeoffs either.
> "Companies don't use packaging to fool consumers" is not something that you can deduce from "some customers are confused about a specific kind of packaging".
But "when people complain that the purpose of packaging is to fool consumers, they are being stupid" is something you can deduce from that.
> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
Assuming you read the article, they address that: "She now calls them 'unusable.' She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, 'but out of principle, I just can’t.'"
As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.
I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.
And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online.
Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
“It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”.
The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering.
I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.
You can't bake the cake you had in your childhood. You already had it. Even if it had all the same atoms in the same positions it would not be the same, because you are not the same.
While you may understand the nostalgic aspect from a logical level, I don't think you understand it beyond that. This next line:
> But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.
To me anyways really indicates that. I know there are a zillion from-scratch recipes online and in books and in other media. That isn't the point.
> If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Once again, I think you are totally missing the point. I think this captures why it's a big deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8TEJtQRhw Betty Crocker is effectively doing that.
Without understanding it at more of emotional level, I can see why this doesn't resonate with you. Unfortunately, that also means it is unlikely that you will able to understand why it is a big deal and why other folks are arguing with you the way they are.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly.
You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months.
Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.
There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour.
That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
That's just another unnecessary mix you can buy individually.
> That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
Flour types are not up to some corporation's marketing team. And for home cooking they don't really matter as much as you are implying. Just get the types best suited for the most common thing(s) you are making and make substitutes for the rest.
Also, there's going to be one type that is always stocked more than others. That's your standard flour. You can use it for most recipes (cake and bread) just fine.
Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another.
For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on.
All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good.
So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry.
And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions.
I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.
It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.
When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?
It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
The point is that is a self-induced problem or at least one that you can avoid if you take care to not become reliant on some corporation for your "family" recipe.
You're already reliant on corporations for your family recipes.
People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.
>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)
>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.
>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.
>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”
>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.
>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.
Note that today, one can easily find cake flour that isn't chemically bleached. Also, shortening manufacturers have gone to fully-hydrogenated oils, rather than partially hydrogenated, to reduce the amount of trans-fats. But some are still using palm oil, so it's not a total win.
I was just in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where, just like you'd expect in a museum, 30-40% of the space is devoted to signs explaining what you should think about current political issues. There was one "exhibit" devoted solely to convincing you to do more dark-sky activism.
Even in that context, they couldn't bring themselves to recommend against palm oil. Their sign on that topic remarked that palm oil requires much less land per unit of oil produced than other oils, making it a pro-environment product.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch.
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
Thanks for that. So there are basically three things he mentions:
1. Emulsifiers actually make the texture better
2. The flour they use has had some extra steps
3. They can use industrial machinery to smash their shortening and flour together in a way that's really not possible in a kitchen, that does make the texture better.
As someone else has said, it should in theory be possible to buy "better" flour; and you could buy emulsifiers, or use more egg yolk (which has a natural emulsifier), or use Crisco (which the video says has emulsifiers in it). So it's really the last one that's not easily replicate-able at home.
There is one thing he keeps repeating which I disagree with: "You're not going to be able to do a better job of engineering than the experts at Duncan Hines." Yes, both Duncan Hines and I are optimizing in part for taste. And I have some constraints compared with Duncan Hines: I don't have industrial grade machinery to mash shortening into flour; I can't experiment with and precisely measure an arbitrary number of potentially exotic ingredients.
But Duncan Hines has several additional constraints they're optimizing against which don't apply to me: They have to make it simple enough for an average person to make. They have to aim for a "median" palate. They have to make it shelf-stable for years. They have the pressure to shave pennies off the cost (as evidenced by TFA), which may mean (e.g.) buying cheaper chocolate or using a lightly lower quality fat than would be ideal.
So I disagree that it's a given that Duncan Hines' cake mix will be better than something I can make from scratch.
I will, however, concede that there are reasonable advantages to using a "commercial base".
This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.
Now I've been interested in cooking for 30+ years, and do all of our home cooking and baking, and there's no way I would believe that I can substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients and get the same result.
This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol.
The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't.
Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.
It reminds me of when I first started eating homemade bread. At first I didn't like it because it was different than I was used to, I considered getting the additives myself to get the same texture, but eventually I learned to love it and now can't imagine eating supermarket bread.
Or don't. Or add different additives. When cooking "from scratch" you have the option to make what you like and not what some corporation has determined sells the best. A lot of the extra ingredients are only needed for the latter goal but not for the former.
As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.
Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.
I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.
I was on a liquid diet for a much shorter amount of time and my dad noted that he could blend chili. I still like chili and would probably default to that if I had to go back onto a liquid diet.
My mom always used Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup as gravy to put on white rice when I was a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a soup. Mentally, there is now way I could eat it that way. It'd feel like I was just eating gravy.
If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
Slightly off topic, but I’m loving comparing all these sub discussions to programming.
The issues of boxes changing and dependency management, and this thread is rough analogy to coders who just glue prepackaged stuff together or overuse of packages.
I don’t know if there’s any real takeaway but I had never thought of programming problems in this way — things always felt a bit more abstract than cooking is.
You put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.
That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.
The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.
Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.
For the competing view, a lot of the chemistry involved in food is to maximise shelf life, with the cost to health or taste considered acceptable given the improved economics to the supplier.
And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.
A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.
"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.
Commercial cake mix is ultraprocessed,you likely won't find those ingredients in your pantry. The flour is bleached, they add emulsifiers you wouldn't find at home, the vegetable shortening is jydrogenated, etc.
If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.
This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).
You can't swap arbitrarily but it's also not like the baking ingredients are the input to a pseudo random number generator that selects the result. You can absolutely make it more/less sweet, more/less chocolatey, more/less moist, add hints of different flavors etc.
Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.
I'm not sure a blanket statement like that can be made just because this will be so subjective and anecdotal. From a brief google, it would look pretty split. AI summary falls on the homemade cake mix side, but reading through some of the blog posts from both sides, I would really hesitate to view any of them as reliable just because bakers are going to be biased towards their preferred method, both psychologically and skill-wise. From my experience in baking competitions, my family and I have had better luck with homemade mixes.
I'm not disagreeing since taste is subjective, and for blind taste tests I could definitely see most people choosing what they are used to which would probably be box mixes. I'd be interested to see if culturally it's different since I think box mixes are generally more popular in the USA.
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
I'm glad it's not just anecdotal. I had an American colleague whose husband praised her amazing guacamole recipe. The recipe turned out to be a jar of guacamole and a jar of salsa mixed together. I may have forgotten the details but a jar of guacamole was certainly listed as an ingredient. I thought it was a joke!
I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost.
People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside?
Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.
Totally false, in large part because a real cake recipe is not usually just a collection of dry ingredients and an egg, the way Betty Crocker usually is.
Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg.
I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.
And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.
Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.
Agreed for flavor - using good ingredients makes a huge difference. But texture is also a big part of how we experience food, and box cake's texture is very hard to beat IMO (at least I've never been able to do it).
I'm currently reading 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and the author talks about this exact dilemma. She attributed the difference to the fact that box-cake recipes tend to use oil for the fat, while recipes from scratch often prefer butter. The way oil can fully coat the flour changes how the gluten chains develop during baking, which changes the texture.
If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.
Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?
I'm saying its not trivial to replace a box mix in a recipe with from scratch ingredients. And no, frozen dinners don't have very good flavor or texture compared to the food it emulates. Boxed cakes are superior than from-scratch cakes by many metrics. But yes, I agree that people should definitely make their own and try to get better. It's just not a trivial replacement in a recipe. Box mixes in certain granny subcultures are a staple ingredient, almost on the tier of flour. If my meatloaf glaze recipe calls for ketchup, I'll just use Heinz or whatever, and not make it from scratch, unless it was really important to me.
If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).
Quality improvements are easy.
Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)
> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?
Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.
Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?
Especially since there's differing levels of quality for boxed cakes too! My local chocolate maker in the SFBAY makes fancy chocolate and cake/brownie mixes, and honestly they're great. The brownie mix specifically comes out better than what I can get in a typical bakery in here in SF.
> Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?
Except the conversation is about Betty Crocker mixes, which are the very definition of built to cost.
Also for whatever reason when I've used the bougie organic box mixes, the results have been very middling. e.g. not baking, but I can make better pancakes from scratch than what comes out of a bag of Birch Benders.
Related, the bougie brands with higher quality ingredients tend to not use as fancy of chemistry in their mixes, so you get better ingredients but you don't get the advanced chemistry.
> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)
That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.
> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
I’d assume most? I got one in university shortly after I moved out, and since combining kitchens with my wife and getting a more precise scale for coffee, now have several more than I actually need.
I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.
There are lots of tools that it's not reasonable to expect a random home kitchen to have -- expensive grinders and mixers, mortar and pestle, double boilers, marble rolling pin to press out pastry, etc. But a kitchen scale is just a huge win for any kitchen. They don't take much space, they're not at all expensive, and it takes less time to convert "half a cup of flour" into grams using your phone than it does to wash the measuring cup.
While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.
I really hope that's said somewhat sarcastically. I pessimistically assume not though.
You're right. To do things you need tools. If you're gonna bake, a scale is a useful tool. It's a pretty small hurdle to jump.
I guess it's funny that on this site there are long threads about rooting phones, or restoring old hardware, or using assembler to patch old software, but also threads which laud the use of cake-mixes and treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...
This reminds me of the thread where people were telling the founders of Dropbox that they'd fail, because it's "so easy" to just set up a Linux box with rsync.
So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.
The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.
I've baked many delicious cakes using the standard flour. For some recipes it will matter, for many it's not as big of a difference in the final result.
Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
I am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
Though people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.
As someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.
It's less for giving but not as unforgiving as some people make it out to be. Even less so when you don't demand commercial level consistent results that can be sold fungible products.
That's why you measure result wherever possibly - poke the cake with a toothpick and see how much sticks to it, measure internal temperature for large meats, bake until the outside reaches the desired appearance, etc.
I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
Two main mistakes that people make:
1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in.
2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
Some pack, some sift and scoop. You have to know what the recipe wants. Weigh is in my opinion superior, it just wasn’t widely accessible before cheap digital scales.
four is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.
My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.
The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.
As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and
> ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller
> than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.
Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder
It sounds like she has been claiming that the recipe that is literally printed on the side of the box has actually been "her" recipe for all these years.
That's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.
Traditionally Limoncello is not done via distillation process. But infusion. Like many of the other Italian alcoholic beverages (various versions of amari, nocino, etc).
On the other hand I wish there was a legal avenue for home distilling like there is for homebrewing. Beer doesn't interest me much but the ridiculous balance of a reflux still is fascinating to me.
Totally. An Austrian fellow (who was indeed a grandfather) we rented a cottage from did this and told us about when I asked about what he was going to do with the hundreds of apples falling from his ancient apple tree. Apparently it's legal there to distil your own eau de vie at a non-commercial scale. We went home with a complementary empty plastic water bottle filled with his Schnaps.
It used to be a thing in the Netherlands too, but the lack of legality made that a much less popular hobby.
Honestly I don't mind if people don't make everything themselves as there's always going to be a line where you go "well I'm not doing that" (you're probably not milling your own flour, growing your own wheat, milking your own cows, raising your own chickens etc...).
I just think they've tried to reach a bit far for a human interest angle - it's already annoying that customers are getting shafted, that's important! We don't need to spin a yarn about little Granny Scroggins cakes disappearing from the local church fair.
But they did disappear. Your disdain for unskilled cooking doesn’t offset the fact that it still became a family tradition.
The entire point of the article is that these aren’t just corporate trash products. They stick around long enough and they get woven into the culture.
Imagine if the recipe for spam changed and destroyed a bunch of Hawaiian dishes. I suspect you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the importance it has in their communities.
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
2 eggs
¼c. water
⅓c. vegetable oil
and the included packet of Hershey's syrup
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)
As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
> I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
Yes but how do you use that to make the line go up enough to justify a pay rise for yourself.
I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
Not at purchase time but eventually they notice that packs don't last as long as they used to. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the big corps) they won't change their buying behavior because of it though.
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
I've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.
It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler.
Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.
If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable.
I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.
> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.
I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.
> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning
It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.
Oh I very rarely use the microwave explicitly because I rarely like the result (it's a useful tool in the kitchen but reheating is rarely what it excels at)
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.
They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes.
I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.
The holes are for safety to let the steam escape so it doesn't all come out right where you're opening it and potentially burn your hand and stirring half way through just evens out the natural hot spots that occur in microwaves. Neither really affects the taste significantly.
You have a magical microwave that heats things evenly throughout then. Normal microwaves heat from the outside in so you have to do the stirring and letting sit to get an even temperature throughout.
Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.
Baking cakes from scratch is easy. Even I could make an apple cake very quickly with a recipe (I quickly found one online, but I could as well just have used the recipe book from the bookshelf), and I had a nice cake ready shortly after, never having made an apple cake before. My wife said "I don't have the time, you do it". And I did.
Mix? Full of additives and whatnot, I bet. I won't eat that.
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.
You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.
I keep four to six flours in my pantry, but none of them contain additives like baking powder. It’s so trivial to add the appropriate amount when it’s called for, I have trouble understanding why self-rising flour would be a popular product.
We're getting off-topic, but let's nerd on baking! Right now:
- All-purpose (the trade term sifted/sieved/filtered wheat)
- Bread flour (same but higher protein content, in this case it's just a different variety of wheat. Some brand use additives like added gluten.)
- Whole grain wheat. I just ran out of regular but I have whole-grain emmer on hand that I can substitute. Anything with gluten and full-grain will do the job, it's usually only 10-20% of a bread anyway.
- Spelt (sifted)
- Whole-grain rye (fine-milled, for something like a French country rye bread or Finnish rye)
- Whole grain rye (course milled, for pumpernickel type breads or Danish rye)
- Durum (for ciabatta and pasta)
- 50/50 mix of sifted rye and wheat, a local specialty called "rågsikt". You can't usually get sifted rye except mixed with wheat so for some fine rye breads you need this mixture. For sweet Scandinavian type breads using syrup.
I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.
Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.
Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).
Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.
Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.
Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.
NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).
Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...
Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
Shrinkflation means that those mixes rely on more sugar or corn syrup solids. Maybe the idea is to keep both serving size and nutrition facts consistent while dropping 3 oz off the box.
Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.'
Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet.
Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way.
I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.
For Judith it’s about the nostalgia of being a girl and having her mother make these cookies with this method. Judith’s mom was likely over-worked and buying a box was a timesaver. Who cares if it’s not “properly” made?
Ok yeah I get that. It's certainly a shame for Judith.
But companies come and go. They change recipes all the time. They do research to make everything as cheap as possible, you may never know it but I knew someone working at Unilever and the Mars bar for example constantly evolves, and let me tell you it's not because they want to give you the best Mars bar, it's just "we found a cheaper supplier for X" or "If we replace X by Y we save Z, and you don't really taste it". I like our Dutch tomatoes: Big, deep red and absolutly tasteless. Now they sell "taste tomatoes", I'm not kidding, they're much nicer. Last much longer on a shelve as well.
Many, many products have changed and disappeared over the decades. I don't see anything worth reporting in the piece, except for "putting attention on shrinkflation". Which is fine of course, but Judith should know better, we all should.
Hey man, maybe practice some empathy. Unexpected change is hard. Unexpected change from a childhood standard really sucks. How could Judith possibly “know better” and ahead of time detach from core memories of her time with her mom like a psychopath?
Idk, maybe it's a cultural thing. I just can't imagine putting any value in a boxed mix. It's just seen as the low value stuff here, the fake food, unthinkable to pass down a generation. Sorry. It's like Christopher Walken having a cheap "won at the fancy fair" watch up his *.
Btw, I used to get chocolate sigarettes for Sinterklaas (dutch Santa Claus). It's a core memory, yeah, they're gone, but it's very different from my mother's Chinese tomato soup. I can still make that "from scratch".
Judith should take this as a generational learning opportunity to provide her children and grandchildren with memories that don't depend on a corporation not altering their products.
I don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper.
That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine.
With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well.
Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo.
I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.
The other weird thing here is passing that recipe along at all. People are impressed with boxed mixes? It’s just weird to me.
It doesn’t even make sense. Buying the individual ingredients is more versatile. You spend less money, and have extra eggs, flour, etc left over that can be used for other recipes. And then it actually feels more homemade too.
Saving 20 seconds (measuring and prepping 3 ingredients for a “mix”) in order to end up with less tasty food is illogical.
Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
I’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly.
You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
I’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.
I don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff.
And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now.
>*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation.
This can't be serious
Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?
I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains?
Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.
Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.
Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.
I have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
Funny enough, in my family we never used boxed mix. My grandmother did everything using a measuring cup and raw ingredients. My mother thought boxed mixes were full of chemicals and not as natural as using individual ingredients.
Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
I don’t know how big the market is for high altitude. The adjustments above 3000m / 10000 ft mean that box mixes are no easier than from scratch. The mix has too much baking powder or soda.
In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.
I do make crêpes from scratch, on the rare occasion I make them. They’re simpler than buttermilk pancakes, with fewer ingredients, and it is a one-bowl operation.
It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
I don't get the point of cake mixes. How hard is it to measure and mix a couple of dry ingredients to make whatever you want instead of buying pre-made mixes for every different type of cake/bread/etc.
The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.
Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.
Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
General Mills should release "Recipe Perfect" (old size) box in a brilliant ad campaign. They can still sell the smaller boxes with the name "Right Size" for the family - "Perfect portions for today's families"
My contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.
It feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.
We’re a technical crowd here, we understand inflation, and we can do math. I suspect most of us here are in a position to change the world, make things better, healthier, safer, faster. It is difficult for me to empathize with “I just can’t out of principle” when the change is so minimal. How can we ever fix big problems if people can’t adapt to such small ones? She didn’t have to deal with inflation for the last 30 years, now she is having to deal with some. To me, the bigger change would be for people to have to go without her cookies! I hope those of us growing up in this faster changing world can remember in our later years that change is necessary.
Not quite the same, but I am reminded of the disturbance in the force when Nabisco discontinued the chocolate wafer cookies that everyone used for cheesecake crusts.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
I honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook.
I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you".
The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity.
On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste.
Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.
In US recipes a cup doesn't mean whatever literal cup you have in you cupboard, it means 237ml. If you cook a lot it pays to have measuring cups of the appropriate size.
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.
That may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Suuuuure, grocery store consolidation, and the consolidation of farming, and processed food has NOTHING to do with their ability to arbitrarily implement shrinkflation, with consumers having few or no other options. Also, kindly fuck off with the name-calling.
And you wrote 4 condescending sentences and still haven't engaged with my point, at all. Next time just write "umadbro" like the troll you are, instead of pretending like you're anything else.
> your writing is overflowing with emotion which is interpreted as idiological and not serious.
no you!!!11. Man, just the absolute cringiest, most embarrassing way of engaging online. You spelled ideological wrong, too.
> I wrote the above before looking at the rest of your comments. After looking at the rest of your comments, I rest my case.
well hot fucking dog, I'm sure embarrassed now! What a joke. Guys, he rested his case!! I'm so owned and devastated!
This is one of the reasons why my recipes standardize on ingredients you can source from any grocery store, and not on specific brand items. I will include it in the recipe as a shortcut, but then show the substitution methods if such an item is unavailable or unreliable.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother
Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.
The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.
> It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch".
I don't buy it. A basic cake recipe is simple measuring (with enough tolerance that anyone can do it), mixing and pouring. No special skills required.
> Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard.
Ok, for sufficiently small values of "not quite the same", but so what? There's going to be more significant differences in your eating experience than the cake having a tiny bit more sugar or whatever. And companies change their mix all the time too.
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
Yeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually think everyone’s mom’s recipe for everything is the equivalent of a traditional furniture build?
Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
The 15oz (pre-shrinkflation) Betty Crocker mix weighs 432g, 2/3 the weight of your recipe's flour and sugar alone, so your recipe is for a much larger cake.
Wal-Mart's own brand flour is about (Canadian) $C0.15/kg if buying 2.5kg, cake & pastry flour more like 24 cents/kg. Granulated Sugar is C$0.15/kg. I'm not sure where you're buying flour & sugar.
Your most expensive ingredient is butter but you could have easily chosen a recipe without butter. I reckon the cake with butter will be much better than BC's version though.
Other advantages of baking with a recipe are being able to scale the recipe up or down as needed, and always having the ingredients for many different recipes on hand without having to buy a vanilla cake mix, a brownie mix, a pancake mix, a waffle mix etc.
The main advantage of a recipe is tweakability. I find most commercial cakes far too sweet, and when I bake from a recipe I can find the point to which I can reduce the sugar without it becoming too bland.
I don't know whether they're harmful but I'm quite happy to cook a cake without Propylene glycol, Xanthan gum, cellulose gum, sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, and monoesters of fatty acids
I've always been baffled by the popularity of pre-made recipe boxes. Maybe useful if I was camping or something, but not when I have access to an actual kitchen.
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpF5B_jHZrw (Adam Ragusea, "How to give brownies a smooth, glossy top") which is where I remembered this from turns out to have been primarily about the appearance of the top - as part of his series of "change two dozen variables one at a time to quantify them properly" baking series (the chocolate chip cookie one is one of the other classics of the form.) (Though I may have it confused with one his other videos since he spends more time on dissolving sugar than boxed mixes here...)
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies,
sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly
delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers
and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
Without having tried the alternative that's a pretty weak claim.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
it's not.
cake flour is simply lower-gluten flour. ther's not a big difference between that and "AP" flour, but a big difference between it and bread or "strong" (high-gluten) flour.
> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.
Well I live in New Zealand and we get them (various box mixes) for the kids to bake cookies, cakes, brownies etc. Yeah we have all the raw ingredients but it's easy for them to follow at their age. When they're older we'll get them to make them from scratch but for a Sunday afternoon activity a box mix is a great easy fun thing for them.
You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
This strikes me as the same sort of semantic game one plays when claiming that "humans are actually fish"; while technically true, this drains the term of its utility.
While I take your point about economy, in my kitchen it would actually take less time to make a cake from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, because we always have them - whereas buying a Betty Crocker mix would require a trip to a grocery store, and not the convenient one around the corner I usually visit.
Nor are the results entirely fungible: I'd always prefer to avoid ingesting preservatives, artificial flavors, corn syrup, etc.
Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.
A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.
My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.
But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.
SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.
i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.
> i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well.
A burger at McKing takes what, a minute to order, a minute to eat, and a minute to dispose of the wrapper paper.
Making a burger on your own? At least an hour worth of time just to buy the ingredients, drive home and store them appropriately so they don't go bad (which assumes you have a car in good working order and a fridge + freezer that work), another hour worth of time to cook it, oh and after you've eaten it you need to properly store all the leftovers...
It is not a coincidence that the rise of the popularity (and availability!) of processed ready-to-eat or fast food more or less correlates with women entering the workforce - one might even say that minimum-effort food was a requirement for women to work.
> I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal.
... if you have a car that's roadworthy enough, time for the drive, money for the fuel, and even then, access to fresh groceries is not a given in the first place because there's no place selling them. 39 million Americans live in food deserts [1], and in places that are not food deserts, actual groceries can simply be unaffordable.
And then, once you have the ingredients, you need to store them. A bunch of stuff will only keep fresh if you have a working refrigerator, in some cases a working freezer... both are far from given. In really small apartments, you might not even have the space for even a small fridge, or you might be so poor your electricity is cut off. Or the apartment is too infested with rats and cockroaches to keep any kind of food that doesn't need (or goes bad in) a fridge and is not canned, which seriously limits the food you can prepare for yourself.
Oh and theoretically Costco or whatever large scale loads of food might be cheaper as well, but again, you need space to meal-prep and even more space in fridges and freezers to keep the food edible for a few days.
Poverty is fucking expensive in the long run because the lack of upfront money for stuff like a car, fridge and a residence with enough clean space forces people to use expensive options such as ready-to-eat meals or fast food - or to go and fill their caloric demand with ultra cheap soda that's in the end just sugar syrup.
Oh and the homeless, they got it even worse, they don't have any other option than that because they don't even have a safe roof over their head. And yet, people look at them eating burgers or soda and saying paternalistic condescending bullshit like "if they just saved on the burgers and soda they could afford an apartment", yeah no that's not how things work.
Slow down, the vast majority of those eating fast food are not poor. They are not living in a good desert. They have car anyway, and access to groceries isn't a problem. They have a house or apartment with a working kitchen so they can store everything.
Costco is cheap, but so is Aldi with much smaller package sizes - I don't have a costco membership because Aldi is so close it isn't worth going often (we go about once a year, but with a friend who has a membership). Every place I've lived have also had discount grocery stores (Most Americans like me do not live in a good desert) - and the fast food just down the street still had a lot of customers.
The above are the people I'm talking about shocking me. They have the means to get cheaper and better meals at hand, but they don't use it.
Don't get me wrong, we should have conversations about poverty. However lets not mistake the majority situation for poverty in conversations. There are people who have all means to do eat better available and choose not to.
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
She's upset that the recipes are different
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice.
You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes:
"The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber
https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge
The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode:
https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45
That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.
I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.
I have a professional cookbook like this
Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
I really wish I had kept a note of what my parents called "neeps and tatties" soup - which was served with thick oatcakes from the local baker.
I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).
https://www.tinnedtomatoes.com/2013/09/scottish-tattie-neep-... is a stew recipe that looks similar to something I would have growing up. I think it was a basic stew with whatever was ready to eat, so we never had a specific recipe for it.
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.
It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.
It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)
Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read.
Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?
When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.
I think you got that flipped. This is two people relating to each other. That’s what happens when it all goes right.
> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access!
I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
She archived the repo after that.
LOL fork
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
Even regional differences in things.
If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.
Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.
Meanwhile, here in Canada I've never seen "sticks of butter", only the large bricks. They're the same size as American ones, and labeled as 454g, but I only recently found out that in some places in the US, they cut them in fours. Before that, the phrase didn't mean anything to me, and I thought it referred to throwing the whole brick in. The smaller 250g packages also exist, but they're rare.
I can't guarantee that the sticks don't exist anywhere, but I've lived in several cities all over the country and I've never spotted anything like that
The 250 g half-bricks are very common. It's how the foo-foo frilly butter is sold ("cultured" butter, imported French butter with 94% fat content, butter made exclusively from milk squeezed from grass-fed cows, etc) because no one is willing to pay $15.00 for a pound of butter but they'll pay $8.00 for a half pound.
Some American butter is wrapped in wax paper as regular sticks with measurement markers on it so that it is easy to measure. Plenty of large bricks though.
And here we use the markers to know how many grams that part is… how silly of us!
I’ve seen them in stores in Canada, but they’re usually more expensive than the 454g blocks. Expensive enough that it’s usually better to buy the block and portion it as needed.
Typical Americana. Cutting up and packaging in extra foil what could simply be sold as a larger brick.
See also, milk bags.
Bricks won't fit in our butter trays. And it'd be an ordeal to open a brick, quarter it, then put the opened 3/4 of the brick back into cold storage until needed again.
Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.
fancy butter is sometimes in foil, https://www.kerrygoldusa.com for example
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
Blame the European regulators who decided that it was no longer necessary to have standard pack sizes.
Pack sizes were regulated in 1975 for volume measures (wine, beer, spirits, vinegar, oils, milk, water, and fruit juice) and in 1980 for weights (butter, cheese, salt, sugar, cereals [flour, pasta, rice, prepared cereals], dried fruits and vegetables, coffee, and a number of other things). In 2007, all of that was repealed - and member states were now forbidden from regulating pack sizes!
I think the rationale was that now the unit price (price per unit of measurement) was mandatory to display, consumers would still know which of two different packs on the same shelf was better value. But standard pack sizes don't just provide value-for-money comparisons, as this article shows.
Ironically it seems (from memory, I've not researched it deeply) that continental butter has not changed from 250g, whereas the British brands have moved first to 200g. I could understand if they switched to 225g as essentially a half-pound block, but 200g isn't any closer to an useful Imperial measure than 250g.
> but then we'd need to measure
Most butter here (and in a number of other countries) have measuring lines on the pack itself in 50g increments, so while I agree with you it's a nuisance to have an open one to deal with, the measurement part is usually a matter of using a knife along the marked line...
If the "certain brands" you refer to don't have those measuring lines, though, then a pox on them...
I'm not sure about that, I've resisted buying those brands and it seems poor form to open them in the supermarket just to check.
Do people here not always have an open pack of butter in their fridge?
We have salted butter for the table, and unsalted for baking. We don't bake often enough to want unopened packs if we can avoid it.
Pre-salted butter is another weird American thing that's completely unnecessary. Butter is also great for cooking and you can keep it for months in the fridge without issues.
It's not really an American thing. It's a pretty wild mix which regions use which how much all across the world (well, across places that commonly use butter obviously)
Salted butter is a weird American thing?
It's much easier finding unsalted butter in the US than in Portugal.
In fact, unsalted butter has been the default everywhere I've lived in the US.
Edit: not to mention, say, salted butter being a point of pride for Britany.
For my part: Only around christmas-time, as it's the only time I bake.
Another dimension we have in France: most butter in 82% fat, but if are not careful you might buy so-called butter with much lower fat. Awful taste on morning toasts, ruined pastries.
82% seems the norm here too, good to know this. Anything lower is labelled 'spread' (based on a very quick search, maybe not always true here). Oddly specific, so maybe there's regulation at play. We prefer French butter for the quality and because it comes in the correct size.
>bigger than the 110g sticks
There are four 110g sticks per package because each one is one quarter of the classic one pound (454g) package of butter, rounded down.
The European equivalent is a 125g package, which is flatter and wider than your square-profile 110g sticks.
The 125 g package tends to be exclusive for more expensive brands though, or special stuff like salted butter. 250 g is the basic European packaging unit of butter, with the occasional 500 g for margarine.
> If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.
Wat. Never in my life have I seen butter in the (mostly western) US sold in anything other than 1/4 lb sticks. There are long, skinny sticks and short, fat sticks, but they're always 1/4 lb. If you say a "pat" of butter, you're getting roughly a 1/2 Tbsp of butter from me. Definitely not half a stick!
Midwest, East Coast, and South I've seen some 1/2lb or 1lb blocks for fancier butters sometimes. But a pat of butter was definitely 1/4-1/2 tbsp of butter in the midwest - depending on if for toast (less) or for baking (exactly 1/2).
I've not heard "pat" used as a serious unit of volume since childhood though. In fact I rarely hear the word pat in relation to butter at all anymore.
I'd say (from northern Europe) that 500 g [1] is a standard pack of butter, even though they've also added the smaller "half packs" of 250 g. For professional use, there's also the full kilogram. Whoa that has got to be expensive these days.
[1]: https://www.arla.se/produkter/svenskt-smor/
One recipe in my family calls for butter "the size of two walnuts".
In Italy this is a fairly common expression.
I've typically (only?) seen it on savory recipes though. For cakes and cookies you'd have quantities in grams.
Also the tbsp and fluid ounce differ by 4% in the UK vs USA. This offsets the nominal 25% difference in pints, with UK pints having 20 oz and US pints having 16, closing the gap a bit to an actual 20.095% between the pints.
> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.
This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
The entire point of my comment is that besides changes in size, there are also changes in ingredients.
Implied by the Devil Dog mentioned later in the essay:
> And I will say this for the good folks in Hershey, Pa. It’s still the same damned good chocolate, what’s left of it. A replacement of whole by broken almonds 1s the only compromise with quality I’ve noticed, while I shudder to think what the “‘creme”’ inside a Devil Dog is made of these days.
Also, Hershey's "chocolate" tastes of vomit due to butyric acid from lipolysis
Thanks for the explanation. Hershey's taste was really a disappointment on my first visit to the US. As a dark chocolate eater I still can't understand how this called chocolate.
Britisher here. I was disgusted to discover this when a colleague brought some from the US. I don't understand how anyone eats / ate this stuff.
My wife worked for a company that does this (for many large brands that you know of. Yes it always surprised me that they even farmed this out, they really only do marketing themselves anymore). Was a real eye opener.
What's even easier than measuring with a kitchen scale is just throwing the entire can in and calling it good. That's often why these recipes used "boxes", "cans", etc as units of measurement in the first place. By converting to standard units you're increasing the amount of effort needed to actually make the dish. It might be more in keeping with the spirit of the recipe to just substitute similarly-sized cans or boxes, even if it's not quite the same taste. It depends on your priorities I suppose. (Though either way it's probably good to include units for the sake of clarity and reproducibility: e.g. "one 16 oz can" rather than "1 can".)
Agreed, I wouldn't say XXXX grams of Hershey's chocolate syrup, but I do want to know what size "a can" means.
On the other hand, for things that you would always measure (or need to do to sizes changing) like flour or sugar, I want that in grams for easy measuring. Even chocolate bars, might be easier to just say how much you need since getting exactly what you are looking for might be difficult/impossible.
RE: finding what "1 can" or "1 bar" was, you may be able to scour archive.org for scans of old magazines and newspapers to see advertisements or product listings for the respective product? At least, that's one route I'd consider
In 1981, the Betty Crocker Supreme Fudge Brownie Mix included a 5.5 oz can of Hershey's syrup. In 1949 you could get a 5 oz can when you purchase 2 quarts of ice cream. https://archive.org/details/mansfield-news-journal-1949-08-1...
It came in multiple sizes. 5 oz is probably the "small can" mentioned at https://archive.org/details/trinity-parish-of-newton-centre/... .
There was also a 16 oz can, https://archive.org/details/escanaba-daily-press-1964-12-10/... and https://archive.org/details/childrenasconsum0000mcne/page/11... and https://archive.org/details/The_Times_News_Idaho_Newspaper_1... and https://archive.org/details/cupl_004738/mode/2up?q=%22can+of... .
And an 8 pound can (!) for food services. https://archive.org/details/foodloversguidet0000harr_d5o7/pa...
So what you're saying is that it's probably 8 pounds, right?
wow haha, nice finds! that's awesome.
I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids, but even so why not just use ml or weight). When it comes to measuring larger ingredients (e.g. apricots) then the dimensions of this platonic cup come into play and I have to start deriving the optimal (almost) sphere packing to figure out how many apricots to use.
No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing. A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot. The issues surrounding volumetric measurements for dry goods is an entirely separate matter. 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots.
Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones.
One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoons and tablespoons.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.
My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablespoon
> No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing.
I understand that other countries (probably North American ones) use the same system too, so thought I was clarifying, not scaring.
> A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot
I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age. Weighing something in grammes is easy and standardised (for most of the Earth's surface at least). Admittedly, imperial measurements can be problematic as a British pint is different to a U.S. pint and "fluid ounces" also have different definitions.
> 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots
I agree - any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots". I've never seen mL used for measuring whole fruit - grammes would be appropriate for mashed fruit though.
Can't recall seeing any British recipe that uses cups so the difference between imperial and metric cups is irrelevant to us.
At least with something like "5 apricots", it should be obvious to the cook if they've got really small, big or varying sizes. Meanwhile, the "cup" measurement can vary depending on the order of which you put the apricots into the cup - do you put the smallest fruit in first, or the biggest?
One of my favorite dessert recipes is Dorie Greenspan's French Apple Cake. It calls for "4 large apples". The recipe is equally enjoyable with a wide range of apple mass, but the character is definitely changed depending on what you do. I think baking is a lot more flexible than most folks give it credit for, but getting more precise units helps ensure consistency from cook to cook and from batch to batch.
For reference a friend who'd expatriated to the midwest posted something about some giant apples they bought. I replied with a picture of an average apple I bought, roughly twice the size of theirs.
Sure, volumetric measurements for solids is generally not great which is why when I transcribe recipes for my own collection I tend to weigh things out.Yep, some recipes don't require precision, but something like a soufflé might.
Weighing things out is the correct method. What could be useful is if recipes provided the ratios of the ingredients along with error margins, so that you could easily type in an amount (e.g. 100g flour) and it'd scale the other ingredients to match. However, maybe that's overthinking it.
> This is more standardised than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot.
How so?
There's no such thing as an imperial cup ergo the cup is not a standardized measurement. Within US customary units the cup is defined.
No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill".
Old family recipes would just say things like "add flour" and that amount was taught face-to-face and hands-on where you added enough till it looked "right" because onions and eggs etc. were not a uniform size.
This reminds me of a boxed item I bought ages ago where the instructions were basically: cook to desired doneness, season as desired.
Also reminds me of a coworker in a restaurant in Palo Alto who, when I asked him the recipe for a dressing I needed to make, told me "ginger juice, lemon, and just make it good". It turns out there were a few other ingredients.
https://oldbritishrecipes.com/collection-of-old-biscuit-reci...
And yeah, depending on how far back you're going or what sources you're using, there will be a lot of vaguely defined quantities. Glen of Glen and Friends on Youtube regularly cooks vintage recipes and gets into how things evolved over time. Most of his old cookbooks are either Canadian or American but from time to time he cooks from UK cookbooks.
It's notable with that link that old recipes mostly used weights for the ingredients and only a minority used cups
I'm sure there will be examples and my childhood memories won't be great but that link isn't a good example of British recipes.
Most of the instances of "cups" come from the "Edwardian recipes" which is a collection of international recipes including American. It includes in the preface a Table of Measures which is what you do for Brits who see "cup" and ask "what the fuck is that?"!
4 cups flour = 1 quart or 1 lb.
2 cups of butter (solid) = 1 lb.
2¹⁄₂ cups powdered sugar = 1 lb.
1 cup = ¹⁄₂ pint
1 glass = ¹⁄₂ pint
1 pint milk or water = 1 lb.
9 large eggs = 1 lb.
1 table-spoon butter = 1 oz.
1 heaping table-spoon butter = 2 ozs.
Butter the size of an egg = 2 ozs.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68137/68137-h/68137-h.htm#Li...
> There's no such thing as an imperial cup ergo the cup is not a standardized measurement.
Which is probably part of why British recipes never say cup.
I’m in the UK too and you can buy measuring cups here easily. It doesn’t mean “a mug from your cupboard”. It _is_ a volume measurement.
I do agree it doesn’t make sense for things that aren’t fluid-like.
"Cups" are also usually labelled on measuring jugs too. I'd refuse on principle to buy a specific measuring cup.
I use the scales for everything and convert recipes to weight once I have them working.
It’s a game changer and works so much better.
Note that UK measuring cups are not exactly the same size as US measuring cups, just as US and UK gallons are not the same size. Yes, this is infuriating. Fortunately you can buy US ones over the internet, or convert it into metric like a normal person.
> It _is_ a volume measurement
Yawn.
Except there's no such thing as a "volume measurement":
Just weight the damn ingredients using a scale. There's a reason no professional kitchen in the world uses "cups".I fully agree that weighing is better, but if you apply your standards to weighing you'll end up concluding there's also no such thing as "weight measurement."
- The so-called "weight" will differ depending on the type of scale and how it's used. People used mechanical kitchen scales just fine even when some measured a bit less and a bit more
- While digital scales can be more accurate, accuracy can still vary, and of course the reported weight can vary depending on where an object is on the scale or how the scale is set up. (Yes, I've used a scale that wasn't on a smooth flat surface. It worked out fine.)
- "Dry materials" like flour are hygroscopic, and even though weighing is better than measuring by volume, you end up weighing the flour + water, when what you want is just the weight of the flour (e.g. you may have to consider the storage history of your flour)
- There's the ~0.4 % weight difference between the equator and the poles.
Yes, these are all very picky, but that's how your "no such thing as" comes across to someone who grew up using volume measurement in the home kitchen.
Instead, simply say that weight measurement results in more reliable and predictable cooking. Perhaps also add that cleanup can be a lot easier when ingredients don't need intermediate staging.
For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate?
It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know?
At least a gram is a gram is a gram everywhere in the world!
> Are you weighing your eggs?
Yes, always.
I don't know what its like where you are, but where I am you can get eggs either in mixed packets, or sorted by size.
So where I am, 1 egg != 1 egg unless you weigh it.
It doesn't matter for soufflé's or meringues. But for everything else you'll have problems if you use random sized eggs.
> Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air?
Absorption capability of flour tends to be more important.
> Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven
Put it in fan mode and reduce the temperature. Hot spot problem disappears.
Also: egg sizes standards are not universal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes
A nice packed cup can fit like 50% more than a very loose cup. It's a much bigger issue "exact precision".
For eggs, as long as you know the right category of egg it'll be within 10% and that's a lot less of a worry.
Professional kitchens doing environmentally-sensitive cooking are going to have climate controlled areas and tools that make that work. Your kitchen probably doesn't. Many recipes will have wildly varying demands for flour (among other things) based on humidity, ambient temperature, elevation, the water, and the flour being used. Volume estimates end up being more accurate to the process than precise weights.
We are still on the imperial system as a whole. Even within the US people who bake know weight measurement is king.
Often the precise amount doesn't really matter though. Likely it was "one can" to begin with because that's just what was convenient and not because the recipe has been optimized to that size.
I guess it depends how much you care about perfectly reproducing the exact same dish. For personal cooking I usually don't - a bit of variance is not a negative thing.
I recently made an old family recipe for carrot cake, and the cream cheese frosting called for "a box" of confectioners sugar and "a package" of cream cheese.
After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
Yes, except for this part:
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
Yes, it was a straight genocide, of the kind so common in territories that were subject to crown control.
I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people.
It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.
The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.
This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.
I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:
> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process
Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.
By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM
(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)
The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:
> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.
Is this what passes for a reference now?
The text that the footnote is attached to is:
"Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF." I infer 'IMPish' as meaning 'like Instant Mashed Potato'.
I read that footnote as a somewhat oblique criticism of two LLMs, rather than on the statistic itself - which may indeed have just been fabricated by the LLM as opposed to an actual statistic somehow dredged from its training data, or pulled from a web search.
Really depressing to think that people trust statistics from these models and soon the models will be ingesting statistics they themselves made up as training data.
Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272
> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.
I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds".
I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.
It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!"
She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.
Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"
She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.
At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.
Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.
I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.
You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.
Not at all — just the US cups will do. Modern UK recipes tend to use tablespoons and teaspoons, but not cups.
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.
A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.
Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about.
Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestive_biscuit
Well also that you can buy graham cracker crumbs, for making things like pie crusts. My friend gave me a weird look when we went shopping and I picked up whole crackers. And then the revelation that graham refers to a type of flour and is not in itself a brand. And Kelloggs sell the crumbs? Wild.
A biscuit base in the UK would usually require a pack of digestives and a rolling pin. I suppose some supermarket sells crumbled biscuits but...
As an aside, Golden Grahams used to be popular in the UK and I don't think anyone stopped to ask what the name meant.
Golden Grahams is popular in France too, but as a foreign name, nobody ever looked it up.
Digestives are a bit thicker, but the ones I had while over there weren't substantially so. You're less likely to get the shared experience of dealing with the goopy mess all over your fingers because your graham is shattering at the first bite.
Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.
If you’re in the UK/Europe, the best alternative I’ve found are Bahlsen’s Milk Dark Chocolate Leibniz.
Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.
I think another option is chocolate 'malted milk' (in the UK) - depending on your preference for ratio of biscuit to chocolate to marshmallow. Leibniz will have more/thicker chocolate, but malted milk will break a bit easier in the mouth (softer/crumblier biscuit).
I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.
But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.
We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
6 large (US) eggs is between 12oz and 14.5oz.[0] This has been stuck in my head since I first learned European sizes were different.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...
Could the six eggshells weigh half an ounce each? It's easier to weigh eggs whole.
That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.
That table includes the weight of the shell. I don't think six chicken eggs of a normal size were ever a pound.
This is very interesting.
I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.
I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.
If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
If you see this reply, may I ask a favor?
The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon.
I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT, and we found the recipe below.
Could you check your cookbook to see if it has a recipe like this, and possibly take a photo and send it to me? Email is in my profile. Thanks!
---
Old-Fashioned Baked Macaroni and Cheese (circa 1950s BH&G style)
Ingredients:
1½ cups elbow macaroni (uncooked)
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk (sometimes evaporated milk was used)
1 tsp salt
Dash of pepper
Optional: breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs for topping
Optional: butter for dotting the top
Instructions:
Cook the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain.
In a large bowl, combine the hot macaroni with most of the grated cheese.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, salt, and pepper.
Pour the egg-milk mixture over the macaroni and cheese, stir gently to combine.
Pour into a buttered casserole dish. Top with the remaining cheese, and optionally a layer of buttered breadcrumbs or crushed crackers.
Bake at 350°F for about 45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned on top.
By chance, someone posted the text on Reddit two years ago,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/ydmncf/searchi... ("From Better homes and gardens cookbook 1953")
The one in this very specific 1953 cookbook is not an egg-based custard, but uses as a thickening agent condensed mushroom soup, from a can.
My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.
I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.
I tried my best to update several of my family recipes.
A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”.
This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
This site [1] has some interesting info:
[1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67)
With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg).
[1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html
That "approximately" is too approximate.
2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes.
(Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.)
So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.
As "egg-sized" refers to volume, what quantity of butter would that be?
There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"
Thank you! I never considered it a relative measurement.
> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
Hero.
I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.
Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.
Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/
Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450
And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.
Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...
If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?
There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason.
Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
Link for the lazy:
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
Lucille Bluth underestimated, it turns out!
(Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
She was dead on if you account for inflation.
$10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
Nah, that's inflation.
Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts.
Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
https://pacificwildpick.com/products/square-watermelon-gift-...
I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).
They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
Gosh, you need to write a book. Totally serious. Someone needs to document it.
Uh... I would buy this cookbook... I suspect many others would as well...
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If anyone needs to stay in their lane, it is you. Your analogy doesn't work either. I have my build scripting standardized and in version control. You can't change it because you don't have permission. Even if you did, I still have my copy. Your rude attitude is unwelcome.
> You can't change it because you don't have permission.
Well, right! Who gave the upthread commenter permission to rejigger all the recipes? Those are shared traditions, not something individuals are expected to "fix" without shared permission. That they don't happen to be stored in an authenticated and access-controlled medium isn't really part of the moral analysis.
> Your rude attitude is unwelcome.
Honestly I thought it was whimsy, not rudenss. I didn't expect highly paid tech professionals to be so thin-skinned about cooking, so that's on me. Apologies.
But at the same time, and for the same reason, refactoring your great grandparents' received wisdom is also rude, and that's the part here people have trouble with.
The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update.
To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.
"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
But it is.
Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother.
OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.
OP improved the traditional ties for the actual recipe, while damaging the traditional ties of the formatting.
It's a mixed bag, not a dummy barging in and ruining everything.
How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature.
Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.
> How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature.
It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread.
You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.
You can think they did more damage than good, but if you think they weren't explicitly working to uphold tradition then you didn't read the comment right.
What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.
Why would you try to imitate a boxed cake mix?
They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.
Familiarity. Many grew up eating the boxed cakes so that is what represents what a cake should taste like. And in my opinion the taste and texture of many boxed cakes is good. Plus the simplicity of adding an egg, some oil and water makes it very appealing to many.
You're on Hacker News. Why put an excess of effort into any nostalgic project? Why try to recapture Windows XP GUI or SNES graphics or try to hack together a classic car that was, by all measurements other than cool factor, inferior to a modern car?
You're replying to a comment that responds to the claim that making cake from scratch is significantly harder than using a commercial cake mix because those contain millions of hard to get ingredients.
If you want to precisely emulate it for the fun of it then more power to you but if you just want a good cake then no you don't need to. Basic flour, baking soda, sugar, cocoa powder, etc. will do the trick just fine.
So you're telling me it takes one update to the recipe of the boxed mix and you can never reproduce your old recipes? Sounds like one should avoid using ready made mixes altogether.
Ive made great cookies from 100 year old recipes. Why do would i want a carbon copy of a store cookie.
Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.
Europe accounts for 31% of baking mix sales while North America accounts for 24.5%.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/bakery-p...
> seem cake mix in stores my whole life
I checked my lagest local grocery store chain and they do have one brand of cake mixes. They never really crossed my mind before.
Chocolate chip and two types of pundcake.... though that's both among the simplest baking recipies so i still don't quite see the point.
There's also pre-made pie dough, that i could see using.
Pie dough is quite simple, but I imagine they use some chemistry to improve, as per the other food chemistry posts...
Yes and no. Its usually butter based dough needing to be kneaded finely and left to rest an hour before use, prefferably pre-baked in pan before adding filling for best result.
You can get it quite quick with a food processor or a kitchenaid mixer, but kneading such a dough by hand and having the time to let rest, flatten with a rolling pin and pre-bake in pan, push pie up a bit in the effort ranking.
So i feel there is real value in quickly putting a pre-flattened doough sheet in a pan, especially if some chemistry can skip the pre-bake step.
So i see the appeal much more for this product over pound cake mix which is just four, sugar, egg and leveling agent.
That's despite Europe having 2x the population of North America.
The EU contains about 30% more people than the USA alone. (450MM vs 340MM)
North America overall contains many more people than the EU. (340 + 129 + 40 for just USA, Mexico, Canada, plus another ~50MM in smaller countries. 560ish total)
The EU is only around 2/3 of the population of the continent of Europe.
Europe is also somewhat poorer than North America, to be fair.
Is cake mix expensive? Wouldn't powdered milk and egg be cheaper than real eggs? Is it actually more expensive to bake with cake mix than with short shelflife milk and egg?
These companies must be making bank.
It depends but cake mixes are brand products and so don't enjoy the same kind of competition that fungible raw ingredients do.
It depends on how much cake you bake though. For many ingredients you'll need less than the smallest packaging size - and much less than packaging sizes that aren't way overpriced.
Can we stop calling things you find weird “American?” Like Jesus Christ, Europe isn’t some special land where everyone makes food from scratch and capitalism doesn’t exist.
I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.
Cake mix is not only an American invention, predominantly sold by American companies (even in the European market), featuring traditionally American baked goods. (Pound cake, brownies and chocolate chip)
Looking for cake mix history in sweden descibe its initial import from USA and England as American style cookies and brownies became popular.
Its American association is well founded. And i did not use the word wierd. I simply pointed out that this ubiquity of "cake mix" baked goods is not reflected in my experience, and may be more concentrated in USA.
In particular in take issue with phrasing cake mix as "family recipe" as even the brands i can find at my store are younger than one generation, and has nowhere near the cultural footprint that they seem to have in USA.
> pound cake
This isn't meant to reply to the rest of the comment, but as an American I don't think I've ever seen or eaten a pound cake mix?
The recipe is the name... You either make it for $1 or you go to the grocery/bakery and grab the $2 pound cake sitting on the counter.
Most mixes people buy (at least around here) are brownies, cookies, and spongecake.
I use poundcake as a synonym to spongecake. The ingredients and process are the same, with variations large enough between recipes to accommodate both. (Cupcake, chocolate cake, lemom cake, some apple cakes all use the same basic dough composition too)
Poundcake vary greatly beyond a "pound".
If anything, spongecake is more strictly defined, originally not using leveling agents, relying on the air bubbles introduced in the beating of the eggs.
But thats semantics. Perhaps spongecake is more recognised as the umbrella term.
Ok we'll sponge cake is absolutely not an American invention.
Going by first use by the term, poundcake would be British by about 30 years prior to the influential book American cookery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Cookery). But modern poundcake also relies on the american invention of "double acting baking powder".
I have, I even have one on the shelf waiting for the occasion to make it.
>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.
Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.
I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...
But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.
Be snobby about cake ingredients.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Leaky gut is a myth. It's used to scare people and sell things. If you don't believe me, feel free to read it's Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome Thank you, I'd not read it was a myth before and had confused it with another condition 'worsening allergy symptoms due to the effects of alcohol'.
Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms.
My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
"Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear.
[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
Lots of things are emulsifiers, are you saying eggs and butter are bad for the gut?
It's scary for how we have gone from "don't use Wikipedia as a citation" to "bro just trust what Wikipedia says about controversial topics".
I'd much rather eat a cake that has the texture of a cake rather than some food science abomination. It's corporations that have taught you to desire the wrong definition of a cake.
Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things.
Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
Using limited equipment is not a virtue.
And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal.
Let people like what they like.
> If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better.
If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas.
Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
Exactly. "Home cooking" that results in something that may as well be store bought as a finished product is kinda weird.
Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch.
Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch.
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
And box mix tend to be overly sweet (at least from my limited experience tasting then when I was a student in the us)
Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests. Very few bakers short of folks with a lot of volume are doing stuff from scratch.
It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one.
The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
Don't neglect the cultural component when considering taste tests. I've heard there are many americans who actually prefer american chocolate. To me it tastes like sugary beeswax with a hint of sock.
Fair. I am definitely speaking of US consumers.
The milk in American chocolate is spoiled.
I wonder what is the proportion of that according to countries. In France, there's a label "fait maison" that's supposed to limit how much the baker or restaurateur rely on pre made mix. But besides this if a professional baker uses a premade mix, how do they differentiate themselves (but then I guess from my experience in the US some shops mostly compete on decoration and not taste)
> Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests.
Could be a "New Coke"[1] thing, where people just like the one with more sugar. There's a reason food companies pack the stuff into everything - it (usually) works.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
> It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.
If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
> subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
You will be surprised to learn that brands have very differently tasting products developed for different markets. Often even under the same name.
> Often even under the same name
This is an issue with Kellogg's cereal and Lay's potato chips in China. They purport to be available. But they're not the same product.
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a good idea; it entirely defeats the purpose of branding.
> The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
95% of bakeries are using a box mix and a packet of jello pudding. That's the secret.
Ability to cook is a spectrum. In order for your statement to be true, then the average cook must be 'almost always' better at producing cake than the average bake mix.
You can bake good cake from scratch with very little skill as long as you can follow instructions and mix shit together in the right amounts.
> Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch.
Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum.
> Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise
It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining.
> To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience
Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting.
About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit.
I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor".
Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap.
> Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives
Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.
Nah not just a snob.
> Poor every day people. I pity them
I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.
My Beppe's (Frisian grandmother) boterkoek (butter cake) was a well-loved staple at church and school bake sales. She closely guarded her recipe, but shared it with my eldest sister who, after she died, told me that she actually used margarine instead of butter in her recipe. Everyone, not even just her family, loved her boterkoek, and yet it didn't even have butter in it.
My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.
Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique.
Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that.
If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really.
Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
What I am calling snobby is to look down on grandma's cooking because she used processed foods. Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking. In the US Midwest a tradition is to use a box cake mix as a base and add to it flavorful additions, like homemade jams, fruits, whipped cream, etc. If I went to someone's house and their grandma served to me, it would be extremely snobbish to think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is".
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
> Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking
Do you have a source? I really haven't met anyone using cake mixes to make cakes.
But if you mean they use butter instead of milking a cow directly and producing the butter then yes, they use processed food.
It’s a class/geographical thing. In my early childhood in a fancy suburb of a big city, my parents and people in their social circle used mixes 0% of the time, but when we moved to a smaller town it was way more common.
You're talking about USA, I'm not.
> I would like the emphasize "consistency".
This matters when you are trying to sell a product, not so much when you are cooking for friends and family as long as you get into the ballpark which isn't really that hard. Little variances and surprises just make home cooking more interesting.
I am loving this thread, and how cake is suddenly up there as a controversial, polarising topic.
Respect for working in a bakery, just hope you haven't got too many burn scars on your forearms from doing long night shifts. I am in broad agreement with you and I appreciate the difficulties of making a consistent product, particularly when there are variables in temperature, seasonal availability of ingredients, lots of machinery to keep running and workers that are probably taking a bit more than cake to see their shifts through.
In the UK, as far a cakes are concerned, you either have a 'bought one' or something you make from scratch yourself. There is no in-between and a cake mix would be frowned on by middle class snobs as 'having cheated'. Or, failing that, taken as an insult. A 'bought one' would be entirely understandable, and what you might expect for birthday celebrations, at home or in the workplace. But a cake mix?
A home made cake is 'proof of work' and the use of a cake mix just undermines it. Approximately the same amount of time is spent in the kitchen and the oven is on for the same amount of time, plus there is the same amount of washing up.
Advertising these processed foods started a lot earlier in America than anywhere else. There are geographical challenges that make this understandable. But, over time, the food companies coalesced into a dozen gigantic mega-corporations and brands that once stood for quality and no adulterated ingredients (from the days before the FDA) now stand for adulterated ingredients.
In the UK we used to have Quaker owned confectionery companies such as Cadburys where the original product was all about health, happy workers and all these good things. They automated processes because they were ideologically against slavery. But, generations on, with the likes of Cadburys owned by the likes of Kraft or Nestle, it isn't like that. The milk and cocoa content goes down, the sugar and palm oil goes up. The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
Back to stupid British snobbery, I would prefer one of your mass-made cakes any day over something that has been made by a snobby Brit as the 'ultimate in cake', where you can't just enjoy it, you have to express to the baker that every mouthful is like the greatest, most orgasmic experience in the history of the universe, for which you are eternally grateful. In these scenarios, you daren't wolf the cake down as that would be disrespectful, and you daren't ask for anything more than the thinnest slice since any more would be deemed greedy.
> None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
If the US can make you pay the income tax difference when living abroad then I fail to see why we can't do the same for companies using these kinds of schemes.
I think in the UK “shop bought cake” and “home made cake” are basically 2 different things that look kind of similar.
Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a distinctive taste and texture which I really don’t like. If I made a cake at home and it ended up tasting like something from the supermarket I’d consider it a failure.
> The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
This part interests me. I have no idea what seals of approval are worthwhile or not. I just see that they are printed on the package and assume it counts for something. Is there some controversy relater to cocoa in this case?
Cocoa/chocolate is an industry that happens to use a fair bit of child slavery, unfortunately (among other bad practices, I just single out that one because it's the one that I consider the most abhorrent)
Getting a fair trade certification requires a supply chain inspection, and in theory, would not be possible to get for producers which have child slavery in the supply chain. Though of course, supply chain inspections are complicated and I believe this is by no means perfect (nothing is).
Rainforest Alliance certified has nothing to do with ethics in treatment of the humans involved in the supply chain, just environmental impact.
> None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if all the Starbuckses disappeared?
Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)
Box cakes are widely available in most of Europe. They taste more than ok but sure nobody here would claim it’s a family recipe.
Available, sure, but the small sliver they get in the baking aisle probably says all you need to know about the turnover they generate.
Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
"A Man Ate Expired Boxed Cake Mix. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." (Frozen Hot Sauce, iykyk)
something something presence in blood...
[flagged]
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
Agreed, but you claimed above that:
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
Just to push back on this slightly, I'm sure I've watched Youtube videos with someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking.
As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting.
This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
> someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking.
Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.
> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker
Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
Do you have an example of these unreachable ingredients? The main ones - dextrose, whey, emulsifiers - can be found at any supermarket as "bread improver" or "dough conditioner" mix.
Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
So someone who is used to industrialized cake baking prefers industrialized cake recipes? What exactly do you think this means about the quality of cake you can bake from scratch at home? Do you really need a cake expert to tell you what cake is good??
Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe?
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
> Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
komali2 says> Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries...
News alert: the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, but many people, like parent poster here, cannot let go:
https://www.sott.net/article/441076-The-cholesterol-hypothes...
Dude, that's a conspiracy theory website that is all about UFOs and not getting vaccinated. You are wasting everyone's time by posting this link.
Most of the world's agriculture concerns growing commodity crops to feed animals - 'big beef'. This is big business and the source of all hatchet jobs on Ancel Keys. Their message is simple, you don't need fruit and vegetables, you need steak and butter!
Find me one centenarian that got there by eating a diet heavy in saturated fats. Just one!!!
Saturated fat is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile sugar is as bad or even worse than people think it is.
Your comment makes as much sense as "Tobacco is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile coal fires are as bad or even worse than people think it is."
If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.
They produce different textures and tastes.
If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.
But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.
Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
> Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.
That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? Something tells me this is about that bias people have, the one where long chemical names are all bad, because they're chemicals, and the only good chemicals one may use is ones that are common enough to receive a non-intimidating normal name. It's all chemistry all the way down.
If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor.
Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.
Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
Nothing in this comment suggests anything bad about them, just that you can do it a different way.
If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason.
It's cheaper and nicer to buy from simple graineries than from some faceless megacorp that's probably just Nestle, that's shrinking your boxes and not telling you as if you're a moron and can't tell.
Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.
In Norway these products usually don't have powdered fats. They will typically require that you add egg(s) and butter/margarin, maybe milk etc.
Here's the ingredient list for Toro Brownies, translated by me.
Sugar, wheat flour, reduced-fat cocoa, baking powder(calcium phosphate, sodium carbonate), coffee, salt, vanillin
I'm not sure about the fat reduced cocoa, for all I know that might just be what I think of as normal cocoa powder, and the rest are just regular ingredients anyone would use. No fancy surfactants and powdered fats etc.
But then there is even less point in buying the branded mix rather than individual ingredients that you can use for various recipes with ratios that you like.
The point is that I can make brownies, rolls, whatever I please without having a cupboard full of all kinds of crap like flour, sugar, cocoa etc that attracts bugs and expires and so on.
I buy one bag that's dirt cheap and has everything I need including instructions. And it just has the same stuff I would be using anyway so there's no downside. No scary ingredients. Just freshly baked goods on demand.
What I'm learning is that some people don't keep a stock of what I would consider "bare minimums" in their cupboard.
First of all, properly stored flour, sugar, and cocoa powder doesn't attract bugs. Glass jars that seal well, done. Hell even plastic tubs. It expires pretty rarely as well, surely you can just bang out a couple of loaves of bread before that happens?
Anyway, yeah, is it not like, a very normal thing to keep flour, sugar, baking soda, cocoa powder, salt, perhaps yeast on hand? Butter, oil, some pasta, maybe some rice? Like, how do you cook otherwise, just buy small batches of these things every time?
That's not the claim I'm refuting, this is
> That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
My point was that these added ingredients aren't special space magic, they all have a purpose and that purpose is something home bakers can often replicate with simple ingredients.
I'm refuting the notion that it's impossible to best the box because of the exotic ingredients.
I make no claim as to whether box vs common ingredients are better/healthier/etc. They are what they are.
Okay, that's fair then.
But I wish you would have replied to the comment making that claim. Not one by a different person making a different point.
The comment I replied to stated
> That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason?
I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear.
I'm confused. So you are dismissing them?
Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.
If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
> I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I don't think so. bruce511 was replying to a completely different part of the ancestor comment, disliking the list of chemicals regardless of whether they do something unique, and tavavex was rebutting a dislike of chemicals.
> Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.
> If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
I don't understand what you mean by "dismissal". When I'm "dismissing" them it is in the context of "you don't need these to make delicious cakes competitive with the box goods." And the reason I'm dismissing is because of availability to a home cook.
It's fair to point out the parent comment was talking about the fear of chemicals in the foods, not a concern I share. I was more writing in terms of whether or not you actually need these ingredients to be successful baking.
I'd further say that, especially with food, there's no strict "bad/good". The ingredients are simply different. While it does impact the final outcome, you likely won't taste much difference if you used canola oil or corn oil in a recipe, for example. Does that make corn or canola bad/good? No, they are just different ingredients that accomplish the same goal. With that in mind, availability becomes a much more important thing to consider. So I can dismiss the need for xanthan gum for a home cook because I know that potato starch will fill the same role while being easy to find in the store. It's more available, not better.
I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.
I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners.
My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.
We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.
> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie
They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.
They could just sell the full package like they used to before if they don't want to change the packaging. The entire point of reducing the content is to mislead the consumer into not noticing a price increase.
Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.
You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air.
But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag.
This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
I think that's a known quantity. Only a child would think a bag of chips is completely filled with chips. In fact, I remember first hearing about this in some science show or something; it hadn't occurred to me before then that the bags were mostly empty, it was just the way chips were packaged.
>If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break.
Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?
Complain about feeling ripped off? Absolutely. I don't buy chips much, but skin care products are the worst offenders, with both the box and the container inside having extra space to make it look like more product than it has. I don't make complaining about this my whole identity, but I have complained about items with excessive amount of air in the container whenever I've received one.
I was asking specifically about chips and the like. I've seen that shit you mention in creams and pastes and other stuff like that and yeah, that's definitely deceitful and nobody likes that. That said, for me it's not about getting ripped off, but about making it difficult to tell when I'm about to run out, especially if it's some specialty product that I have to go out of my way to get.
"Companies don't use packaging to fool consumers" is not something that you can deduce from "some customers are confused about a specific kind of packaging".
And even for chips, "bag of air" isn't the only viable packaging method. Of course others aren't without tradeoffs either.
> "Companies don't use packaging to fool consumers" is not something that you can deduce from "some customers are confused about a specific kind of packaging".
But "when people complain that the purpose of packaging is to fool consumers, they are being stupid" is something you can deduce from that.
> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food.
I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat.
My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes.
When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?
Assuming you read the article, they address that: "She now calls them 'unusable.' She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, 'but out of principle, I just can’t.'"
As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.
I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.
And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online.
Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
“It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”.
The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering.
I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.
You can't bake the cake you had in your childhood. You already had it. Even if it had all the same atoms in the same positions it would not be the same, because you are not the same.
I agree that the precise atoms don't matter that much, but disagree that you can't have the same cake again. You just need to believe that you can.
> I get the nostalgic aspect.
While you may understand the nostalgic aspect from a logical level, I don't think you understand it beyond that. This next line:
> But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.
To me anyways really indicates that. I know there are a zillion from-scratch recipes online and in books and in other media. That isn't the point.
> If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Once again, I think you are totally missing the point. I think this captures why it's a big deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8TEJtQRhw Betty Crocker is effectively doing that.
Without understanding it at more of emotional level, I can see why this doesn't resonate with you. Unfortunately, that also means it is unlikely that you will able to understand why it is a big deal and why other folks are arguing with you the way they are.
When recipes that we use called for a box of something. You seem argumentative about this, but it's easy to understand.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly.
You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months.
It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.
Standard flour? Which standard?
There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour.
That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
> all purpose flour
Use that one. It's flour, but like for all purposes. You can make cake with it fine.
fun fact: in other parts of the world it's not called "all purpose", and I don't mean translations.
> self rising flour
That's just another unnecessary mix you can buy individually.
> That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
Flour types are not up to some corporation's marketing team. And for home cooking they don't really matter as much as you are implying. Just get the types best suited for the most common thing(s) you are making and make substitutes for the rest.
Also, there's going to be one type that is always stocked more than others. That's your standard flour. You can use it for most recipes (cake and bread) just fine.
Eh? We eat almost no flour on a daily basis. We might eat cake every few months.
"Standard" is not standard at all.
If you only bake cakes I guess it makes sense — but you can make many other baked goods with flour.
Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another.
For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on.
All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good.
So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry.
And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
I think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :)
"Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me.
First World Problems I guess...
I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions.
I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.
It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.
When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?
It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
It's time to log off lil bro
Some products are packaged so that one box constitutes one unit, and when they change that units size out of corporate stinginess, it’s inconvenient.
It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.
The point is that is a self-induced problem or at least one that you can avoid if you take care to not become reliant on some corporation for your "family" recipe.
You're already reliant on corporations for your family recipes.
People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.
Yes, we're commenting on an article that would have proven Food Stallman right.
Relying on processed flour and similar staples is hardly the same as relying on a specific unique cake mix.
>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is
There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)
>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.
>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.
>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”
>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.
>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.
[0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...
Note that today, one can easily find cake flour that isn't chemically bleached. Also, shortening manufacturers have gone to fully-hydrogenated oils, rather than partially hydrogenated, to reduce the amount of trans-fats. But some are still using palm oil, so it's not a total win.
I was just in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where, just like you'd expect in a museum, 30-40% of the space is devoted to signs explaining what you should think about current political issues. There was one "exhibit" devoted solely to convincing you to do more dark-sky activism.
Even in that context, they couldn't bring themselves to recommend against palm oil. Their sign on that topic remarked that palm oil requires much less land per unit of oil produced than other oils, making it a pro-environment product.
If you still buy it, you are being played for a fool. I don’t buy shady products like this.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch.
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec
Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.
Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
Thanks for that. So there are basically three things he mentions:
1. Emulsifiers actually make the texture better
2. The flour they use has had some extra steps
3. They can use industrial machinery to smash their shortening and flour together in a way that's really not possible in a kitchen, that does make the texture better.
As someone else has said, it should in theory be possible to buy "better" flour; and you could buy emulsifiers, or use more egg yolk (which has a natural emulsifier), or use Crisco (which the video says has emulsifiers in it). So it's really the last one that's not easily replicate-able at home.
There is one thing he keeps repeating which I disagree with: "You're not going to be able to do a better job of engineering than the experts at Duncan Hines." Yes, both Duncan Hines and I are optimizing in part for taste. And I have some constraints compared with Duncan Hines: I don't have industrial grade machinery to mash shortening into flour; I can't experiment with and precisely measure an arbitrary number of potentially exotic ingredients.
But Duncan Hines has several additional constraints they're optimizing against which don't apply to me: They have to make it simple enough for an average person to make. They have to aim for a "median" palate. They have to make it shelf-stable for years. They have the pressure to shave pennies off the cost (as evidenced by TFA), which may mean (e.g.) buying cheaper chocolate or using a lightly lower quality fat than would be ideal.
So I disagree that it's a given that Duncan Hines' cake mix will be better than something I can make from scratch.
I will, however, concede that there are reasonable advantages to using a "commercial base".
Relevant content begins at 03:40
But I'm not sure why they think I can't but the same emulsifiers etc online or at the local Asian grocery store.
This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.
But these bakers don't want "cake mix", they want the specific Betty Crocker cake mix
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What's in the box is unknown to most people. Unknowable, even. They are surprisingly complex mixes.
Don't they have ingredients lists or is that a very European thing?
Sure they do, but nobody seems to have posted it yet.
The exact box in the article (it had a link!) has the following ingredients listed:
Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Sugar, Corn Syrup, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Leavening (baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Modified Corn Starch, Palm Oil, Corn Starch, Propylene Glycol Mono and Diesters, Monoglycerides, Salt, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Xanthan Gum, Cellulose Gum, Carob Powder, Artificial Flavor.
Now I've been interested in cooking for 30+ years, and do all of our home cooking and baking, and there's no way I would believe that I can substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients and get the same result.
This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol.
The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't.
Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.
Oh no! Scary looking ingredients! That must mean they’re bad!
Oh no! Comment on a long list of ingredients! That must mean they're making the argument I think they are!
It reminds me of when I first started eating homemade bread. At first I didn't like it because it was different than I was used to, I considered getting the additives myself to get the same texture, but eventually I learned to love it and now can't imagine eating supermarket bread.
> substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients
Why are you limited to what's in your pantry? Just get the extra ingredients online.
Or don't. Or add different additives. When cooking "from scratch" you have the option to make what you like and not what some corporation has determined sells the best. A lot of the extra ingredients are only needed for the latter goal but not for the former.
As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.
Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.
I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.
I was on a liquid diet for a much shorter amount of time and my dad noted that he could blend chili. I still like chili and would probably default to that if I had to go back onto a liquid diet.
My mom always used Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup as gravy to put on white rice when I was a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a soup. Mentally, there is now way I could eat it that way. It'd feel like I was just eating gravy.
Yes, I’ve eaten it as soup for decades. It’s great with some pasta mixed through it too.
I stand corrected !
That was my sister’s favorite soup as a kid. I ended up having it a lot as a result as well.
If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
Oh no they don't.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
Slightly off topic, but I’m loving comparing all these sub discussions to programming.
The issues of boxes changing and dependency management, and this thread is rough analogy to coders who just glue prepackaged stuff together or overuse of packages.
I don’t know if there’s any real takeaway but I had never thought of programming problems in this way — things always felt a bit more abstract than cooking is.
The confidence. Why wouldn't they? The nobility inherent in suffering more labor to make a worse final product?
You put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.
That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.
The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.
Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.
For the competing view, a lot of the chemistry involved in food is to maximise shelf life, with the cost to health or taste considered acceptable given the improved economics to the supplier.
And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.
A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.
There's such a high amount of snobbery (with a sizable pinch of classism) in the comments on this post. Ick.
Is Sysco a name that you associate with good food? In my mind they mostly supply chain restaurants and prisons.
"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.
Yeah, no. I definitely noticed when the kitchen manager was fired and they started serving reheated Sysco food instead. It’s not good at all.
Oh yes they do: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec
(Also linked above)
What’s the difference between making the mix yourself, or just buying the exact same ingredients already mixed at the correct ratio?
Commercial cake mix is ultraprocessed,you likely won't find those ingredients in your pantry. The flour is bleached, they add emulsifiers you wouldn't find at home, the vegetable shortening is jydrogenated, etc.
If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.
This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).
Do you know if that will even work? Baking is not cooking -- you can't just swap ingredients and get a similar result.
You can't swap arbitrarily but it's also not like the baking ingredients are the input to a pseudo random number generator that selects the result. You can absolutely make it more/less sweet, more/less chocolatey, more/less moist, add hints of different flavors etc.
Yes but that's the fun part of baking: thinking you know better, substituting things, failing miserably and then either:
a- gaslighting yourself into thinking it's better than the original
b- blaming the original recipe
c- posting a one-star review on the recipe saying you replaced eggs with banana and it came out horrible
Eventually, you succeed, and get to claim you were right all along (mostly because the trash can cannot speak of your failures).
When a baker makes the cake from scratch I’m alway disappointed. Boxes mixes taste better. They can’t beat the emulsifiers in those box mixes.
Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.
I'm not sure a blanket statement like that can be made just because this will be so subjective and anecdotal. From a brief google, it would look pretty split. AI summary falls on the homemade cake mix side, but reading through some of the blog posts from both sides, I would really hesitate to view any of them as reliable just because bakers are going to be biased towards their preferred method, both psychologically and skill-wise. From my experience in baking competitions, my family and I have had better luck with homemade mixes.
I'm not disagreeing since taste is subjective, and for blind taste tests I could definitely see most people choosing what they are used to which would probably be box mixes. I'd be interested to see if culturally it's different since I think box mixes are generally more popular in the USA.
yes for your health
I think people know you can purchase baking ingredients.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
I'm glad it's not just anecdotal. I had an American colleague whose husband praised her amazing guacamole recipe. The recipe turned out to be a jar of guacamole and a jar of salsa mixed together. I may have forgotten the details but a jar of guacamole was certainly listed as an ingredient. I thought it was a joke!
I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost.
People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside? Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.
Totally false, in large part because a real cake recipe is not usually just a collection of dry ingredients and an egg, the way Betty Crocker usually is.
Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg.
I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.
And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.
Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.
Agreed for flavor - using good ingredients makes a huge difference. But texture is also a big part of how we experience food, and box cake's texture is very hard to beat IMO (at least I've never been able to do it).
I'm currently reading 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and the author talks about this exact dilemma. She attributed the difference to the fact that box-cake recipes tend to use oil for the fat, while recipes from scratch often prefer butter. The way oil can fully coat the flour changes how the gluten chains develop during baking, which changes the texture.
Baking may not be easy but it’s not that hard.
If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.
Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?
I'm saying its not trivial to replace a box mix in a recipe with from scratch ingredients. And no, frozen dinners don't have very good flavor or texture compared to the food it emulates. Boxed cakes are superior than from-scratch cakes by many metrics. But yes, I agree that people should definitely make their own and try to get better. It's just not a trivial replacement in a recipe. Box mixes in certain granny subcultures are a staple ingredient, almost on the tier of flour. If my meatloaf glaze recipe calls for ketchup, I'll just use Heinz or whatever, and not make it from scratch, unless it was really important to me.
If they’re only going to need dinner once a month? Hell yes.
Consistency is hard, but quality isn't.
If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).
Quality improvements are easy.
Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)
> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?
Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.
Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?
Especially since there's differing levels of quality for boxed cakes too! My local chocolate maker in the SFBAY makes fancy chocolate and cake/brownie mixes, and honestly they're great. The brownie mix specifically comes out better than what I can get in a typical bakery in here in SF.
> Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?
Except the conversation is about Betty Crocker mixes, which are the very definition of built to cost.
Also for whatever reason when I've used the bougie organic box mixes, the results have been very middling. e.g. not baking, but I can make better pancakes from scratch than what comes out of a bag of Birch Benders.
Related, the bougie brands with higher quality ingredients tend to not use as fancy of chemistry in their mixes, so you get better ingredients but you don't get the advanced chemistry.
> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)
That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.
https://satwcomic.com/family-time
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
Depending where you are, low (and high) protein flour can be hard to find at the supermarket.
>Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird
Just think of it as the Arduino Nano/ESP32 module of baking.
> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
> In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?
I’d assume most? I got one in university shortly after I moved out, and since combining kitchens with my wife and getting a more precise scale for coffee, now have several more than I actually need.
I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.
There are lots of tools that it's not reasonable to expect a random home kitchen to have -- expensive grinders and mixers, mortar and pestle, double boilers, marble rolling pin to press out pastry, etc. But a kitchen scale is just a huge win for any kitchen. They don't take much space, they're not at all expensive, and it takes less time to convert "half a cup of flour" into grams using your phone than it does to wash the measuring cup.
While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.
I really hope that's said somewhat sarcastically. I pessimistically assume not though.
You're right. To do things you need tools. If you're gonna bake, a scale is a useful tool. It's a pretty small hurdle to jump.
I guess it's funny that on this site there are long threads about rooting phones, or restoring old hardware, or using assembler to patch old software, but also threads which laud the use of cake-mixes and treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...
It's about convenience and nostalgia.
This reminds me of the thread where people were telling the founders of Dropbox that they'd fail, because it's "so easy" to just set up a Linux box with rsync.
So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.
Mickey D's is also a whole lot more popular than home-made burgers. Proof of their quality according to your logic, I guess.
The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.
I've baked many delicious cakes using the standard flour. For some recipes it will matter, for many it's not as big of a difference in the final result.
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.
This is a useful thing to know when writing instructions on how to bake 1000 Betty Crocker cakes
Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
Why separate, split, and then combine? Why not combine and then split?
I am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.
At that point you may as well start worrying about the variance of the yolk to egg white ratio in different eggs.
^ yea pretty much this
I'm not 100% sure but whenever I've tried to reduce an egg without splitting first, it always ends up with a super wrong amount of yolk
I could also just be bad at it, idk
In many recipes you must whip the whites, and they must be completely yolk free.
You're cake is going to turn out fine with a bit more or less egg in it. Just adjust other liquids a bit to compensate.
Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead
I always doubled "an egg and a white" as "two eggs and two whites". Whites and yolks are very different and make the end result very different.
What about liquid egg whites/yolks? Aside from the shelf life this always seemed like a key selling point to me.
You can just buy small eggs, and use them for fractional eggs.
Grocery stores sell different sizes of eggs over here.
Sure you can. Scramble them a bit and weigh them.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
Volume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's.
I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
Though people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.
Cooking is art. Baking is science.
They are both art and both science.
The baking is a science meme needs to die.
When your baking you need to learn to react to the dough that's in front of you.
As someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.
It's less for giving but not as unforgiving as some people make it out to be. Even less so when you don't demand commercial level consistent results that can be sold fungible products.
Getting a new oven has invalidated every single time written down in a recipe here. (usually not too hard to adjust, but still)
That's why you measure result wherever possibly - poke the cake with a toothpick and see how much sticks to it, measure internal temperature for large meats, bake until the outside reaches the desired appearance, etc.
I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
I mean, also, when was the last time you had your oven properly calibrated? How sure are you that it's actually 350 F?
IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
Brown sugar should be packed; flour must not be — you’ll get substantially more mass per volume than the recipes assume.
Some pack, some sift and scoop. You have to know what the recipe wants. Weigh is in my opinion superior, it just wasn’t widely accessible before cheap digital scales.
In my four decades of baking, I have never seen a recipe that calls for packing flour. It is always sifted, spooned and leveled, or weighed.
Weighing is the only weigh.
four is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.
Or measure flour by weight instead of volume.
Flour should be weighed.
My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.
The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
Well I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.
Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.
As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and
> ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller
> than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.
Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder
It sounds like she has been claiming that the recipe that is literally printed on the side of the box has actually been "her" recipe for all these years.
Wait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.
I cut the sugar in grandma's limoncello by 30% and still end up with rocket fuel syrup which my friends think will cause sleep problems and diabeetus
The yeast eats the sugar and turns it into alcohol. More sugar more alcohol, grandma’s version sounds good.
Alcohol concentrations over 20% kill yeast, so adding sugar to distilled spirits will not create more alcohol.
Ahh, yes I forgot it’s not fermented you just use vodka or something stronger with the lemon peels.
That's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.
Traditionally Limoncello is not done via distillation process. But infusion. Like many of the other Italian alcoholic beverages (various versions of amari, nocino, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limoncello
On the other hand I wish there was a legal avenue for home distilling like there is for homebrewing. Beer doesn't interest me much but the ridiculous balance of a reflux still is fascinating to me.
In many parts of the world, that's absolutely a thing grandpas do :)
Totally. An Austrian fellow (who was indeed a grandfather) we rented a cottage from did this and told us about when I asked about what he was going to do with the hundreds of apples falling from his ancient apple tree. Apparently it's legal there to distil your own eau de vie at a non-commercial scale. We went home with a complementary empty plastic water bottle filled with his Schnaps.
It used to be a thing in the Netherlands too, but the lack of legality made that a much less popular hobby.
I visited an orchard this weekend and came home with a bottle of plum brandy. Seems like every family of central european descent has a recipe.
Honestly I don't mind if people don't make everything themselves as there's always going to be a line where you go "well I'm not doing that" (you're probably not milling your own flour, growing your own wheat, milking your own cows, raising your own chickens etc...).
I just think they've tried to reach a bit far for a human interest angle - it's already annoying that customers are getting shafted, that's important! We don't need to spin a yarn about little Granny Scroggins cakes disappearing from the local church fair.
But they did disappear. Your disdain for unskilled cooking doesn’t offset the fact that it still became a family tradition.
The entire point of the article is that these aren’t just corporate trash products. They stick around long enough and they get woven into the culture.
Imagine if the recipe for spam changed and destroyed a bunch of Hawaiian dishes. I suspect you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the importance it has in their communities.
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
This is a link to the last time I talked about this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745
and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
Ok so this is the cake pan thread.
They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
> I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
Yes but how do you use that to make the line go up enough to justify a pay rise for yourself.
I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
You assume the average consumer is paying any attention to the net weight of their purchases.
Not at purchase time but eventually they notice that packs don't last as long as they used to. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the big corps) they won't change their buying behavior because of it though.
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.
At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.
Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.
I've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.
In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.
It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler.
Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.
If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable.
I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.
> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.
I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.
> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning
It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
> (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.
How did you arrive at those numbers? I (an American) have always understood one "standard large egg" to be 50g.
> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)
How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.
Oh I very rarely use the microwave explicitly because I rarely like the result (it's a useful tool in the kitchen but reheating is rarely what it excels at)
And a sprinkle of MSG to supplement the naturally occurring that which was probably lost during the cook/freeze/reheat cycle
> Ive scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
Care to share this recipe? Sounds wild.
Just take your current favorite recipe and make more breading for the coating. That doesn't sound like there's much to actually do there.
> I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.
Is this satire? Do you do your cooking in an industrial cafeteria kitchen? Do you have a family of 20 people?
Reads to me like he's doing an extreme version of the meal prep trend.
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
[edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared
I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.
They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes.
I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.
The holes are for safety to let the steam escape so it doesn't all come out right where you're opening it and potentially burn your hand and stirring half way through just evens out the natural hot spots that occur in microwaves. Neither really affects the taste significantly.
You have a magical microwave that heats things evenly throughout then. Normal microwaves heat from the outside in so you have to do the stirring and letting sit to get an even temperature throughout.
Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.
Baking cakes from scratch is easy. Even I could make an apple cake very quickly with a recipe (I quickly found one online, but I could as well just have used the recipe book from the bookshelf), and I had a nice cake ready shortly after, never having made an apple cake before. My wife said "I don't have the time, you do it". And I did.
Mix? Full of additives and whatnot, I bet. I won't eat that.
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.
You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.
I keep four to six flours in my pantry, but none of them contain additives like baking powder. It’s so trivial to add the appropriate amount when it’s called for, I have trouble understanding why self-rising flour would be a popular product.
What are your flour varieties?
We're getting off-topic, but let's nerd on baking! Right now:
- All-purpose (the trade term sifted/sieved/filtered wheat)
- Bread flour (same but higher protein content, in this case it's just a different variety of wheat. Some brand use additives like added gluten.)
- Whole grain wheat. I just ran out of regular but I have whole-grain emmer on hand that I can substitute. Anything with gluten and full-grain will do the job, it's usually only 10-20% of a bread anyway.
- Spelt (sifted)
- Whole-grain rye (fine-milled, for something like a French country rye bread or Finnish rye)
- Whole grain rye (course milled, for pumpernickel type breads or Danish rye)
- Durum (for ciabatta and pasta)
- 50/50 mix of sifted rye and wheat, a local specialty called "rågsikt". You can't usually get sifted rye except mixed with wheat so for some fine rye breads you need this mixture. For sweet Scandinavian type breads using syrup.
Self-raising flour is a British invention. We're also responsible for the Chorleywood bread process and probably other abominations too.
i grew up in the U.S. and didn’t realize this fact. Thank you for explaining it, this makes so much more sense now!
I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.
Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.
Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).
Baking a cake IS easy. Try it out XD
Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.
I have made many cakes which is how I know that yes, a basic cake is pretty trivial.
Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.
Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.
NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.
No, he didn’t. What he was referring to was combining finished products to create new dishes. Not using pre mix products.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
That makes sense since it's an American dessert. Germany seemingly only produces the worst possible version of American bread and butter popcorn.
I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).
Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...
Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.
> None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging
I mean, they were probably all made using convenient measurements that were converted to whatever units you use after the fact.
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
Shrinkflation means that those mixes rely on more sugar or corn syrup solids. Maybe the idea is to keep both serving size and nutrition facts consistent while dropping 3 oz off the box.
Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.'
Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet.
Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way.
I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.
For Judith it’s about the nostalgia of being a girl and having her mother make these cookies with this method. Judith’s mom was likely over-worked and buying a box was a timesaver. Who cares if it’s not “properly” made?
Ok yeah I get that. It's certainly a shame for Judith.
But companies come and go. They change recipes all the time. They do research to make everything as cheap as possible, you may never know it but I knew someone working at Unilever and the Mars bar for example constantly evolves, and let me tell you it's not because they want to give you the best Mars bar, it's just "we found a cheaper supplier for X" or "If we replace X by Y we save Z, and you don't really taste it". I like our Dutch tomatoes: Big, deep red and absolutly tasteless. Now they sell "taste tomatoes", I'm not kidding, they're much nicer. Last much longer on a shelve as well.
Many, many products have changed and disappeared over the decades. I don't see anything worth reporting in the piece, except for "putting attention on shrinkflation". Which is fine of course, but Judith should know better, we all should.
Hey man, maybe practice some empathy. Unexpected change is hard. Unexpected change from a childhood standard really sucks. How could Judith possibly “know better” and ahead of time detach from core memories of her time with her mom like a psychopath?
Like I said, it's not nice for Judith.
Idk, maybe it's a cultural thing. I just can't imagine putting any value in a boxed mix. It's just seen as the low value stuff here, the fake food, unthinkable to pass down a generation. Sorry. It's like Christopher Walken having a cheap "won at the fancy fair" watch up his *.
Btw, I used to get chocolate sigarettes for Sinterklaas (dutch Santa Claus). It's a core memory, yeah, they're gone, but it's very different from my mother's Chinese tomato soup. I can still make that "from scratch".
We're not telling off Judith, were discussing this on an entirely unrelated forum. Any empathy displayed here would be performative.
Judith should take this as a generational learning opportunity to provide her children and grandchildren with memories that don't depend on a corporation not altering their products.
Do you mill your own flour? Or do you just use some boxes commercial mix like a filthy commoner?
I don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper.
That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine.
With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well.
Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo.
I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.
The other weird thing here is passing that recipe along at all. People are impressed with boxed mixes? It’s just weird to me.
It doesn’t even make sense. Buying the individual ingredients is more versatile. You spend less money, and have extra eggs, flour, etc left over that can be used for other recipes. And then it actually feels more homemade too.
Saving 20 seconds (measuring and prepping 3 ingredients for a “mix”) in order to end up with less tasty food is illogical.
*edit* ok never mind there is some reason to the madness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45246000
Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.
You have been able to buy milled flour for thousands of years, and will probably be able to for as long as there is civilization.
Betty Crocker would be lucky to survive another hundred years.
> pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs.
If you're too poor to afford an appropriate amount of eggs maybe.
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Original source: https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-m...
I’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly.
You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
I’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.
Passing down a box mixture as a "recipe" seems really alien to me in the UK. Measuring flour, sugar and spice isn't rocket surgery.
What other branded products do you guys depend on for basic cooking? Campbell's soup had a moment here postwar.
I don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff.
And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.
I’ll bring up this story the next time a client is arguing for a complete vendor buy-in.
Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.
If the box mix stops working then people will stop buying it and throw the recipes away, leading to a lasting reduction sales.
But… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now.
>*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation.
This can't be serious
Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?
Shiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.
I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains?
Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
I assume it creates an opportunity for the old formula to arrive at a premium price and packaging.
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...
This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
[flagged]
Please don't use HN for ideological battle. This is clearly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.
Sales of betty crocker mix can go down.
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
vanilla and sugar has also shrinkflated
Vanilla and sugar are both relatively fungible commodities. If one brand shrinks, buy another one.
Um. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies.
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.
Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.
Clif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.
I have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
The “healthy request” or “low sodium” cans will have potassium chloride and sugar added, compared to the conventional.
Funny enough, in my family we never used boxed mix. My grandmother did everything using a measuring cup and raw ingredients. My mother thought boxed mixes were full of chemicals and not as natural as using individual ingredients.
Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.
When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are.
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
If these people were so smart, they wouldn't be so poor.
Lots of people are both smart and poor, but getting smarter can help you get richer.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
Yogurt instead of buttermilk.
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
I don’t know how big the market is for high altitude. The adjustments above 3000m / 10000 ft mean that box mixes are no easier than from scratch. The mix has too much baking powder or soda.
Because most people probably have all of those ingredients in their pantry anyways?
In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.
I do make crêpes from scratch, on the rare occasion I make them. They’re simpler than buttermilk pancakes, with fewer ingredients, and it is a one-bowl operation.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic or not.
It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.
Is this satire?
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
You can actually buy stuff like that if you really want to keep a mix on hand.
The King Arthur powders are great:
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m...
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow...
And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter:
https://hoosierhillfarm.com/shop-products/butter-powder/
The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
I don't get the point of cake mixes. How hard is it to measure and mix a couple of dry ingredients to make whatever you want instead of buying pre-made mixes for every different type of cake/bread/etc.
The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.
Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.
Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
General Mills should release "Recipe Perfect" (old size) box in a brilliant ad campaign. They can still sell the smaller boxes with the name "Right Size" for the family - "Perfect portions for today's families"
My contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.
Yeah but did you see the yacht it bought?
>>Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
I can't cook at all, but not sure you can call using a packet mix a "recipe". If that counts, please ask me for my recipe for beans on toast.
It feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.
We’re a technical crowd here, we understand inflation, and we can do math. I suspect most of us here are in a position to change the world, make things better, healthier, safer, faster. It is difficult for me to empathize with “I just can’t out of principle” when the change is so minimal. How can we ever fix big problems if people can’t adapt to such small ones? She didn’t have to deal with inflation for the last 30 years, now she is having to deal with some. To me, the bigger change would be for people to have to go without her cookies! I hope those of us growing up in this faster changing world can remember in our later years that change is necessary.
Not quite the same, but I am reminded of the disturbance in the force when Nabisco discontinued the chocolate wafer cookies that everyone used for cheesecake crusts.
So does the mix now call for slightly smaller eggs?
Or has the mix changed to still work with the same number of eggs?
If the former, that is stupid. If the latter, then the flavour/consistency is bound to change.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
A Sauceror? You can also make your own spaghetti and become a Pastamancer...
If you make everything from scratch you'll save so much money that you'll make out like a Disco Bandit?
And thats why i hate all recipes with measuring "units" like : pinch, spoon, dash etc....
Can i tell you about our lord and saviour the have metric system? :)
I honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook.
I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you".
The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity.
On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste.
Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.
In US recipes a cup doesn't mean whatever literal cup you have in you cupboard, it means 237ml. If you cook a lot it pays to have measuring cups of the appropriate size.
Shrinkflation and private equity really do ruin everything!
This feels like when leadership has us push through a "minor change" to a service. And it causes alot of, lets say interesting, bugs downstream
Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be:
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.
The factory must grow.
Ostensibly not since she didn’t bother changing the recipe when the box shrank to ~15oz.
This is a case study in why it’s so important to understand how your users actually use your product.
>“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.
That may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.
Cake flour, any full-line supermarket will have it.
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
Why?
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
Shrinkflation breaks userspace
bit rot, but with recipes
reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
So....just rot then?
more like a funny sort of dependency drift
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Not always. Canned tuna is my favorite. They shrunk the 6oz can to 5 over a decade or so. At one point I laughed at a 5 3/16 oz can.
Huh?
Don't feed the idiological troll.
Suuuuure, grocery store consolidation, and the consolidation of farming, and processed food has NOTHING to do with their ability to arbitrarily implement shrinkflation, with consumers having few or no other options. Also, kindly fuck off with the name-calling.
You're drawing the wrong conclusions.
Also, your writing is overflowing with emotion which is interpreted as idiological and not serious.
Reasonable people are not going to waste their time trying to have a civilized discussion with someone who drops f-bombs and isn't serious.
Edit: I wrote the above before looking at the rest of your comments. After looking at the rest of your comments, I rest my case.
And you wrote 4 condescending sentences and still haven't engaged with my point, at all. Next time just write "umadbro" like the troll you are, instead of pretending like you're anything else.
> your writing is overflowing with emotion which is interpreted as idiological and not serious.
no you!!!11. Man, just the absolute cringiest, most embarrassing way of engaging online. You spelled ideological wrong, too.
> I wrote the above before looking at the rest of your comments. After looking at the rest of your comments, I rest my case.
well hot fucking dog, I'm sure embarrassed now! What a joke. Guys, he rested his case!! I'm so owned and devastated!
You continue to prove my point...
...
I rest my case.
(Also, I'm sorry about the mispeling earlier.)
> There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes
It's not their recipes if it's from a box.
I hope Duncan Hines is reading this.
If only there wasn't a universal unchanging unit of measure that did not depend on third parties and was used across the world.
This is one of the reasons why my recipes standardize on ingredients you can source from any grocery store, and not on specific brand items. I will include it in the recipe as a shortcut, but then show the substitution methods if such an item is unavailable or unreliable.
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil
> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother
Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.
The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.
It's a lot easier to make from a box.
> There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch"
Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them
> It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch".
I don't buy it. A basic cake recipe is simple measuring (with enough tolerance that anyone can do it), mixing and pouring. No special skills required.
> Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard.
Ok, for sufficiently small values of "not quite the same", but so what? There's going to be more significant differences in your eating experience than the cake having a tiny bit more sugar or whatever. And companies change their mix all the time too.
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
Sure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea
Yeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually think everyone’s mom’s recipe for everything is the equivalent of a traditional furniture build?
I'm wondering if this isn't mostly an American thing. I have no qualms admitting that my recipes are from other recipes, but I modified them
Why would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it?
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...
The 15oz (pre-shrinkflation) Betty Crocker mix weighs 432g, 2/3 the weight of your recipe's flour and sugar alone, so your recipe is for a much larger cake.
Wal-Mart's own brand flour is about (Canadian) $C0.15/kg if buying 2.5kg, cake & pastry flour more like 24 cents/kg. Granulated Sugar is C$0.15/kg. I'm not sure where you're buying flour & sugar.
Your most expensive ingredient is butter but you could have easily chosen a recipe without butter. I reckon the cake with butter will be much better than BC's version though.
Other advantages of baking with a recipe are being able to scale the recipe up or down as needed, and always having the ingredients for many different recipes on hand without having to buy a vanilla cake mix, a brownie mix, a pancake mix, a waffle mix etc.
The main advantage of a recipe is tweakability. I find most commercial cakes far too sweet, and when I bake from a recipe I can find the point to which I can reduce the sugar without it becoming too bland.
I don't know whether they're harmful but I'm quite happy to cook a cake without Propylene glycol, Xanthan gum, cellulose gum, sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, and monoesters of fatty acids
I've always been baffled by the popularity of pre-made recipe boxes. Maybe useful if I was camping or something, but not when I have access to an actual kitchen.
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
So, cake flour?
From what I remember it’s more about the industrial emulsifiers. They give a more sponge-like cake they people tend to enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpF5B_jHZrw (Adam Ragusea, "How to give brownies a smooth, glossy top") which is where I remembered this from turns out to have been primarily about the appearance of the top - as part of his series of "change two dozen variables one at a time to quantify them properly" baking series (the chocolate chip cookie one is one of the other classics of the form.) (Though I may have it confused with one his other videos since he spends more time on dissolving sugar than boxed mixes here...)
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
it's not. cake flour is simply lower-gluten flour. ther's not a big difference between that and "AP" flour, but a big difference between it and bread or "strong" (high-gluten) flour.
Because you live in a small apartment and don't have storage space for a thing of flour, a thing of sugar, cocoa you might use twice a year?
Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Because you value convenience?
Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.
> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.
Well I live in New Zealand and we get them (various box mixes) for the kids to bake cookies, cakes, brownies etc. Yeah we have all the raw ingredients but it's easy for them to follow at their age. When they're older we'll get them to make them from scratch but for a Sunday afternoon activity a box mix is a great easy fun thing for them.
Everything is a raw ingredient.
With that attitude, you might as well just buy a finished cake from the store!
You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
This strikes me as the same sort of semantic game one plays when claiming that "humans are actually fish"; while technically true, this drains the term of its utility.
While I take your point about economy, in my kitchen it would actually take less time to make a cake from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, because we always have them - whereas buying a Betty Crocker mix would require a trip to a grocery store, and not the convenient one around the corner I usually visit.
Nor are the results entirely fungible: I'd always prefer to avoid ingesting preservatives, artificial flavors, corn syrup, etc.
What? If you want to make your own touch then varying the ingredients is one of the most impactful things you could do.
Basic cake recipes are simple enough for even younger children to do and are a great way to teach basic cooking skills.
And if you only use flour and sugar twice a year then there's probably other things you would be better off making yourself.
Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.
A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.
My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.
But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.
SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.
i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.
> i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well.
A burger at McKing takes what, a minute to order, a minute to eat, and a minute to dispose of the wrapper paper.
Making a burger on your own? At least an hour worth of time just to buy the ingredients, drive home and store them appropriately so they don't go bad (which assumes you have a car in good working order and a fridge + freezer that work), another hour worth of time to cook it, oh and after you've eaten it you need to properly store all the leftovers...
It is not a coincidence that the rise of the popularity (and availability!) of processed ready-to-eat or fast food more or less correlates with women entering the workforce - one might even say that minimum-effort food was a requirement for women to work.
I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal. I spend an hour a day cooking, which does add up though-
> I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal.
... if you have a car that's roadworthy enough, time for the drive, money for the fuel, and even then, access to fresh groceries is not a given in the first place because there's no place selling them. 39 million Americans live in food deserts [1], and in places that are not food deserts, actual groceries can simply be unaffordable.
And then, once you have the ingredients, you need to store them. A bunch of stuff will only keep fresh if you have a working refrigerator, in some cases a working freezer... both are far from given. In really small apartments, you might not even have the space for even a small fridge, or you might be so poor your electricity is cut off. Or the apartment is too infested with rats and cockroaches to keep any kind of food that doesn't need (or goes bad in) a fridge and is not canned, which seriously limits the food you can prepare for yourself.
Oh and theoretically Costco or whatever large scale loads of food might be cheaper as well, but again, you need space to meal-prep and even more space in fridges and freezers to keep the food edible for a few days.
Poverty is fucking expensive in the long run because the lack of upfront money for stuff like a car, fridge and a residence with enough clean space forces people to use expensive options such as ready-to-eat meals or fast food - or to go and fill their caloric demand with ultra cheap soda that's in the end just sugar syrup.
Oh and the homeless, they got it even worse, they don't have any other option than that because they don't even have a safe roof over their head. And yet, people look at them eating burgers or soda and saying paternalistic condescending bullshit like "if they just saved on the burgers and soda they could afford an apartment", yeah no that's not how things work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_deserts_in_the_United_Sta...
Slow down, the vast majority of those eating fast food are not poor. They are not living in a good desert. They have car anyway, and access to groceries isn't a problem. They have a house or apartment with a working kitchen so they can store everything.
Costco is cheap, but so is Aldi with much smaller package sizes - I don't have a costco membership because Aldi is so close it isn't worth going often (we go about once a year, but with a friend who has a membership). Every place I've lived have also had discount grocery stores (Most Americans like me do not live in a good desert) - and the fast food just down the street still had a lot of customers.
The above are the people I'm talking about shocking me. They have the means to get cheaper and better meals at hand, but they don't use it.
Don't get me wrong, we should have conversations about poverty. However lets not mistake the majority situation for poverty in conversations. There are people who have all means to do eat better available and choose not to.
The people relying on cake mid probably don’t have any of that in their pantry.
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
What a Betty Crocker of Enshitification.
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Speaking of cookie recipes, have you tried the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe?
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Is every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?
Which recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.
The one from email spam circa 2003?
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Would Americans consider learning to bake instead?