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Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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