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Comment by jedimastert | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.

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A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.

[edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared

I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.

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.

The holes are for safety to let the steam escape so it doesn't all come out right where you're opening it and potentially burn your hand and stirring half way through just evens out the natural hot spots that occur in microwaves. Neither really affects the taste significantly.

You have a magical microwave that heats things evenly throughout then. Normal microwaves heat from the outside in so you have to do the stirring and letting sit to get an even temperature throughout.

Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.

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.

And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.

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.

Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.

I keep four to six flours in my pantry, but none of them contain additives like baking powder. It’s so trivial to add the appropriate amount when it’s called for, I have trouble understanding why self-rising flour would be a popular product.

What are your flour varieties?

We're getting off-topic, but let's nerd on baking! Right now:

- 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.

Self-raising flour is a British invention. We're also responsible for the Chorleywood bread process and probably other abominations too.

i grew up in the U.S. and didn’t realize this fact. Thank you for explaining it, this makes so much more sense now!

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