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Comment by zinclozenge | Hacker News Reader

I used to be anti mix. Now I'm 100% on the train. The simple fact is that the extra stabilizers and emulsifiers that are added to the mix don't detract from the flavor and texture at all, if anything enhancing the texture. Mixes are engineered to consistently reach a desired result. Krusteez pancake mix is a permanent staple in my house. If I feel like baking something like brownies, or a cake I'll go out to buy a mix on my next shopping trip. Cookies are probably the only thing I won't bother due to their simplicity.

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> Mixes are engineered to consistently reach a desired result.

That’s pretty much exactly what I dislike about mixes and ready-made food. It’s not that they’re bad, but they are the same every time. Your pancakes taste like my pancakes. That’s boring. I like tasting other peoples pancakes. I usually stock some ready to eat food for times when cooking is just not and option, but I rarely end up reaching for it.

Also, they’re single use, they can not be disassembled to build something else. With eggs, milk, flour, butter, I can make pancakes - American and German style, Dutch Baby, Kaiserschmarrn, waffles, … A pancake mix is a pancake mix, it’s pancakes, nothing else.

It's almost as if you can tweak mixes or something.

Seriously, you want to change pancake mix? Use some buttermilk instead of milk. Mix in a bit of sourdough starter. Add some fruit. Cook down a can of fruit with some sugar and lemon juice and make your own syrup. There are tons of things you can do.

If I go to a fancy restaurant that specializes in pancakes, THEN I expect them to do their own thing. But waking up at morning and getting pancakes that someone has prepared for me is better than waking up in the morning and eating a bowl of cereal or a pre-wrapped muffin. MOST people don't have a go-to pancake recipe... they'd just look up and use the first thing they found online that they had ingredients for.

If you have all that on hand why would you not have eggs, flour, and milk as well?

As nobody in my household drinks white milk, I only have it on hand if a recipe specifically calls for it. And I suspect they wouldn’t quite be the same with chocolate milk, of which there is almost always a supply thanks to kids ..

A while back I switched to using powdered buttermilk for this exact reason. It's been a game changer. I used to avoid buttermilk based recipes as I'd need to find excuses to use it up over the next few weeks.

Your post made me realize I'm the same way with milk. I know powdered buttermilk is considered a valid substitute for standard buttermilk when cooking. I wonder if the same is true of powdered milk.

For baking, yes, many recipes can be converted to use powdered milk.

For non-baking used it can be trickier, I believe. The powdered milk doesn't always act the same.

Let’s not get religious about it - it’s food and you do what you do. I’ll eat your pancakes, mix or not. But the parent I was responding to was extolling consistency as a virtue and I don’t consider consistency (as in “tastes the same every time”, as opposed to “tastes great every time”) a great thing.

And if you start adding sourdough to anything, consistency goes straight out the window. At least my sourdough is anything but consistent.

You can straight up use the sour dough starter that you would normally throw away as scallion pancake mix. Seriously, just pour it onto a greased pan and throw scallions on the other side, then flip and cook til done.

Yes, I know. But my point was that sourdough, at least the one I keep, are living things and are not consistently the same. Mine depends on the time I kept it in the fridge, the temperature it’s kept outside (which depends on the weather), on how active the last generation was and many other factors I have more or less under control. And that manifests in taste difference, raising power etc.

I would assume mixing in buttermilk for milk would mess things up since it messes with the acid ratios, which is one of the things that really matters in baked goods with chemical leavening agents. Usually something with only milk would use baking powder, whereas something with buttermilk would use some portion of baking soda.

100%. I used to cook a lot from scratch. I had a few things that I made a lot and knew how to balance the flavors of. Then when I suddenly found myself with a lot less time to cook, but still with the same picky taste buds, I started buying premade, prepackaged TV dinners from Publix and Whole Foods and doctoring them up with added spices, or chopping an onion or pepper to add to it, after microwaving them for half the time to defrost them.

Like, you can buy anything and make it good.

Your pancakes taste like my pancakes. That’s boring. I like tasting other peoples pancakes.

Then again, some people just want to make reasonably good pancakes for their kids or before heading off to work, without too much thought or effort. Or having to be "creative" or think about how they compare with other people's pancakes. Are you OK with that?

Look, I’m not advocating banning pancake mixes or canned or frozen food. I absolutely understand that people have constraints and not everyone has the time or energy to cook every day. I just say that I personally, don’t consider “it consistently produces the same result.” a good thing in all cases. Are you OK with that?

That's great, of course. Bon appetit.

I was just trying to get back to the point of the original article.

That's not a mix problem, that a you problem. You can very easily customize and build on top of a solid base. Add fruits (berries, banana, etc), add chocolate chips, nuts, etc. Add cocoa powder, cinnamon, etc.

The powder is just a base.

Look up Adam reguseas video about why you can never beat a cake mix in your home. Sometimes it’s just smart to use a mix. And as Sagan said, if you wanna make an apple pie from scratch, you’d have to create the fucking universe.

Further, the most important thing to get right in a pancake (imo) is to get the flour baking powder mix right. Why bother with a scale and everything, if you can just buy a premix that is at best marginally more expensive?

Your point about the same thing being used for multiple is semi valid for some people. For the majority of folks, If they want pancakes this week, odds are they’d like it once more at least. Have you seen a pancake mix box? It costs two bucks and will last a single full serving or two for a family with kids.

A lot of (american) pancake mixes can be used for both pancakes and waffles, but your point stands about other similar preparations.

But I would say that while it's true that the pancakes will be the same every time with a mix, I don't really eat pancakes enough for that to matter.

We make a batch of Alton Brown's mix maybe every other month:

https://altonbrown.com/recipes/semi-instant-pancake-mix/

I don't think we have any trouble with consistency.

For baking, my go to recipe site is Smitten Kitchen.

It's not that we're anti-mix, it's that it's easy to stock the staple baking ingredients and then we can make whatever we want.

I can see where he was coming from, even as I agree that it's a dick move to complain that someone's using mix. It gets to the ethos of pancakes. I can't remember his exact words, but Bittman wrote that you can essentially bind any kind of starch with any kind of liquid and an egg and have a pancake; it's approximately the simplest thing you can make, and it's incredibly forgiving: wildly different ratios of ingredients will still produce cromulent pancakes.

Pancake mix is my one and only bugaboo. The fact that you need your own eggs and milk mean the box is basically saving you from adding a bit of salt, sugar and baking soda to flour. Ingredients I always have on hand. And while I've never done a taste test for pancakes, I'm very loyal to King Arthur flour.

It was a famous result that cooks rejected early mixes that required just water. Snopes marks it as "false" but there's enough of a grain of truth to it to make it relevant:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

I too find it weird that people buy that when it's so easy at home, with ingredients most people have. I suppose if you never bake you don't have flour or baking powder on hand. Eggs and milk are something everyone has.

For folks with no actual interest in cooking, and who live in a place with obnoxiously large kitchens (i.e. USA), they're fine. Also, it helps to be well off, as they're basically a scheme to mark up simple ingredients by a significant multiplier.

People that are interested in cooking are going to have that stuff around, aren't going to be put off by 60 seconds of measuring things out, and like the ability to tweek the composition -- plus making things from basic ingredients increases the understanding of how ingredients work.

Also, for those of us without ginormous kitchens (mine is huge by urban European standards, tiny by suburban American), there's just a limit on how much stuff you can store that you can reliably recreate in under a minute.

> plus making things from basic ingredients increases the understanding of how ingredients work.

That’s a bit of a stretch. Following a recipe doesn’t necessarily imply you understand how ingredients work.

I would say I’m an “above average” cook (define as you will), and yet I still use Krusteez pancake mix. They’re very good from the mix and I’d prefer to waste my time scrolling endlessly or other crap instead (I’m not fooling anyone, time saved making pancakes from scratch is entirely time wasted elsewhere).

The "wasting time" is literally adding three spoons of stuff to flour. (Two for me since I use a full package of baking powder.) It's literally in the 30 seconds range. If you were doing it a lot, you could even pre-mix them in those 30 seconds, and have enough for as many batches as you cared. It's a pretty weird micro-optimization.

You don't learn about how the ingredients work by making one thing from a recipe, but you do if you make a bunch of related things from similar ingredients. On the bread / cake spectrum, one learns to pretty reliably distinguish between things based on leavening agent and if they contain eggs.

Also, I wouldn't say that most above average home cook actually has much interest in cooking. But the average J. Kenji Lopez-Alt fan does. Most people cook because they need to eat. What I'm calling "interest" I'm imagining people where it's at least a hobby -- there's active effort in improving one's understanding of it and technique.

You don't have to be well off to afford a couple dollar box of pancake mix

I swear bisquick is my favorite pancake, it has some intangible quality that I can’t replicate with household ingredients. That said I make sourdough pancakes for health, but I totally agree that flavor wise, mixes taste fine.

try the NYTimes buttermilk recipe. it's outstanding.

You mean this one? https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018180-perfect-buttermi...

I also like instant mashed potatoes because they’re pleasantly shitty like your hometown’s lager, or the pizza place you started going to because it was cheap and close.

Sometimes you want the dish cooked from the choicest ingredients on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Sometimes you just want the end product.

This simple 5m cake recipe changed my mind on mixes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sjv3LRVubo

Adam also goes into the science of cooking, and him breaking down why mixes are good has convinced me.

Check out The Cake Doctor cookbook. it is chock full of great recipes that start with box cake mixes with ammendments. My wife bakes a half dozen birthday cakes from it each year and they are all great!

I was confused when you mentioned that cookies are simpler than pancakes, then I remembered: American pancakes. I was thinking crêpes which is literally just flour, eggs, milk, butter and salt. The "mix" is literally just flour.

American pancakes are the same with the addition of baking powder.

Though if you're making buttermilk pancakes I would imagine most people do not have buttermilk on hand if they're not baking.

I would bet the average American that says they 'cook' are actually just taking frozen meals like pizzas, chicken tenders, biscuits in a can, etc. and heating them in the oven. Households don't typically have even have flour, fresh milk, butter or other staples on hand here.

I would gladly take that bet. There's certainly a subset of Americans who effectively never cook (generally young and urban), and Americans do eat a lot of convenience foods, but everyone I've ever met who says they "cook" is able to prepare at least some dishes from scratch and has ingredients on hand to do so.

I exclusively make pancakes with store bought mix, and in my kitchen I have flour, fresh milk, butter, eggs straight from a farm, and other fresh picked fruits from a farm (that are now stored in a freezer). It's easy to make sweeping generalizations about Americans, but keep in mind that a lot of us Americans that aren't lucky enough to have high paying jobs don't have a lot of time to cook. Deep urban residential areas also experience a phenomenon called "food desert" where grocery store density is extremely low, making it inconvenient to go shopping by car, and downright impossible by public transportation.

I used to be anti pancake mix as well. Then I got a cabin where pancakes are almost a mandatory weekend breakfast and I realized I often forget to bring fresh ingredients (mainly milk). Krusteez was a hit and I became a convert.

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