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.