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Comment by rimprobablyly | Hacker News Reader

Oh no they don't.

I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.

The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.

Slightly off topic, but I’m loving comparing all these sub discussions to programming.

The issues of boxes changing and dependency management, and this thread is rough analogy to coders who just glue prepackaged stuff together or overuse of packages.

I don’t know if there’s any real takeaway but I had never thought of programming problems in this way — things always felt a bit more abstract than cooking is.

The confidence. Why wouldn't they? The nobility inherent in suffering more labor to make a worse final product?

You put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.

That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.

The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.

Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.

And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.

A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.

For the competing view, a lot of the chemistry involved in food is to maximise shelf life, with the cost to health or taste considered acceptable given the improved economics to the supplier.

Is Sysco a name that you associate with good food? In my mind they mostly supply chain restaurants and prisons.

"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.

Yeah, no. I definitely noticed when the kitchen manager was fired and they started serving reheated Sysco food instead. It’s not good at all.

There's such a high amount of snobbery (with a sizable pinch of classism) in the comments on this post. Ick.

Oh yes they do: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec

(Also linked above)

What’s the difference between making the mix yourself, or just buying the exact same ingredients already mixed at the correct ratio?

If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.

This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).

Do you know if that will even work? Baking is not cooking -- you can't just swap ingredients and get a similar result.

Yes but that's the fun part of baking: thinking you know better, substituting things, failing miserably and then either:

a- gaslighting yourself into thinking it's better than the original

b- blaming the original recipe

c- posting a one-star review on the recipe saying you replaced eggs with banana and it came out horrible

Eventually, you succeed, and get to claim you were right all along (mostly because the trash can cannot speak of your failures).

You can't swap arbitrarily but it's also not like the baking ingredients are the input to a pseudo random number generator that selects the result. You can absolutely make it more/less sweet, more/less chocolatey, more/less moist, add hints of different flavors etc.

Commercial cake mix is ultraprocessed,you likely won't find those ingredients in your pantry. The flour is bleached, they add emulsifiers you wouldn't find at home, the vegetable shortening is jydrogenated, etc.

When a baker makes the cake from scratch I’m alway disappointed. Boxes mixes taste better. They can’t beat the emulsifiers in those box mixes.

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