Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
cubbyathome.com
cubbyathome.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We were big fans of cream of mushroom soup, though. Our favorite was to mix a can of that and a can of tomato soup (with the usual 50/50 dilution with water). We called it "cream of tomato".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...
That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.
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.
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.
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
Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.
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.
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
(Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
$10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
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.
Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
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.
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.
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:
Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
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 do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).
That card was has several fun comments and lots of history to my siblings who added to the crustiness of this card.
The original card I remember said to use lard or you can use margarine if you "haven't slaughtered a hog recently".
The recipe in mealie was modernized and tested more.
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?”.
This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
> 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.
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.
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
See also, milk bags.
Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.
I only recently found out that in some places in the US,
they cut them in fours
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...
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.
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.
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.
I've typically (only?) seen it on savory recipes though. For cakes and cookies you'd have quantities in grams.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
How so?
Which is probably part of why British recipes never say cup.
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.
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.
No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures
you have to look up like a "gill".
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.
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjIwI5Vdmds
British recipes today largely use metric units. Pre-metric recipes absolutely did use cups (although this persisted in Canada and the US more than the UK). As Glen points out none of these British cups were standardized.
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.
any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots".
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?
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?
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.
I do agree it doesn’t make sense for things that aren’t fluid-like.
It’s a game changer and works so much better.
Yawn.
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.
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!
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
"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.
> 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)
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 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.
Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.
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.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
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 suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?
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.
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.
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.
I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.
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.
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?
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?
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.
"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 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.
"Standard" is not standard at all.
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).
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.
Use that one. It's flour, but like for all purposes. You can make cake with it fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.
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.
Relying on processed flour and similar staples is hardly the same as relying on a specific unique cake mix.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if all the Starbuckses disappeared?
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.
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.
>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients.
Be snobby about cake ingredients.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
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.
[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
The linked article explains it quite clearly, it’s a good read.
Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
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.
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.
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.
95% of bakeries are using a box mix and a packet of jello pudding. That's the secret.
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.
You will be surprised to learn that brands have very differently tasting products developed for different markets. 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.
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.
Let people like what they like.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.
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.
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).
If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason.
Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.
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.
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.
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.
But I wish you would have replied to the comment making that claim. Not one by a different person making a different point.
> 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.
> 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.
Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/bakery-p...
These companies must be making bank.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
>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?
And even for chips, "bag of air" isn't the only viable packaging method. Of course others aren't without tradeoffs either.
But "when people complain that the purpose of packaging is to fool consumers, they are being stupid" is something you can deduce from that.
> 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.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
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.)
When your baking you need to learn to react to the dough that's in front of you.
I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
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.
The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
(Also linked above)
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.
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).
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).
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
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.
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.
But I'm not sure why they think I can't but the same emulsifiers etc online or at the local Asian grocery store.
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".
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.
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.
Why are you limited to what's in your pantry? Just get the extra ingredients online.
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.
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.
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
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.
Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?
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.
I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just think of it as the Arduino Nano/ESP32 module of baking.
(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.
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'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
> 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 used to be a thing in the Netherlands too, but the lack of legality made that a much less popular hobby.
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.
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.
Let's not make this into something it isn't, please.
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.
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:
3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
2 eggs
¼c. water
⅓c. vegetable oil
and the included packet of Hershey's syrup
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?
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?
Yes but how do you use that to make the line go up enough to justify a pay rise for yourself.
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.
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.
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 don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
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.)
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
How did you arrive at those numbers? I (an American) have always understood one "standard large egg" to be 50g.
Care to share this recipe? Sounds wild.
Is this satire? Do you do your cooking in an industrial cafeteria kitchen? Do you have a family of 20 people?
[edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I mean, they were probably all made using convenient measurements that were converted to whatever units you use after the fact.
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...
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.
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.
Betty Crocker would be lucky to survive another hundred years.
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
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.
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".
If you're too poor to afford an appropriate amount of eggs maybe.
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
You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.
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.
Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.
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.
>*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?
https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...
Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
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.
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.
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.
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can i tell you about our lord and saviour the have metric system? :)
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.
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
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.
> 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!
...
I rest my case.
(Also, I'm sorry about the mispeling earlier.)
It's not their recipes if it's from a box.
> 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.
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.
Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them
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.
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if you only use flour and sugar twice a year then there's probably other things you would be better off making yourself.
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 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.
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.
... 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...
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.
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.
* 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...
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.
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.
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.