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.
(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.
I'm not disagreeing since taste is subjective, and for blind taste tests I could definitely see most people choosing what they are used to which would probably be box mixes. I'd be interested to see if culturally it's different since I think box mixes are generally more popular in the USA.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
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.
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
Just think of it as the Arduino Nano/ESP32 module of baking.
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.