Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

cubbyathome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 721 posts

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#141

Post by Daneel_ »

sevensor wrote: post #41
gwd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to meas…

Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.

Yes, I’ve eaten it as soup for decades. It’s great with some pasta mixed through it too.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#142

Post by extraduder_ire »

e28eta wrote: post #85
zurtri wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes. 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

6 large (US) eggs is between 12oz and 14.5oz.[0] This has been stuck in my head since I first learned European sizes were different.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#143

Post by cheschire »

MangoToupe wrote: post #78
beloch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.

Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.

Cooking is art. Baking is science.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#144

Post by tpmoney »

eulgro wrote: post #11

Why would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it? Oh wait you probably have all of them already.

Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).

* 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...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#145

Post by bigstrat2003 »

mattkrause wrote: post #106
jandrewrogers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.

For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.

That may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#146

Post by massysett »

mattkrause wrote: post #106
jandrewrogers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.

For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.

Cake flour, any full-line supermarket will have it.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#147

Post by llbbdd »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #140
llbbdd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#148

Post by joshstrange »

nanolith wrote: post #45

Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as…

I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

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?”.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#149

Post by cheschire »

foofoo12 wrote: post #89
cbhl wrote: post #86

Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be: - 2 boxes cake mix - 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs) - 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c) YMMV

I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.

The factory must grow.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#150

Post by llbbdd »

marssaxman wrote: post #118
llbbdd wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a raw ingredient.

With that attitude, you might as well just buy a finished cake from the store!

You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
Post reply on HN