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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#161

Post by Spivak »

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.

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.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#162

Post by bluGill »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #35
jhawk28 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.

The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.

four is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#163

Post by jaggederest »

charles_f wrote: post #119

What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that. With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and choc…

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.

It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.

The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.

That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#164

Post by throwaway422432 »

nkrisc wrote: post #137
rimprobablyly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no they don't.

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).

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#165

Post by bluGill »

neilv wrote: post #75
iterance wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands. What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand cracke…

It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#166

Post by gus_massa »

manwe150 wrote: post #92
gus_massa wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs. (Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.) Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.

Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead

I always doubled "an egg and a white" as "two eggs and two whites". Whites and yolks are very different and make the end result very different.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#167

Post by klaff »

joshstrange wrote: post #148
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 m…

I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#168

Post by llbbdd »

Spivak wrote: post #161
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#169

Post by gus_massa »

dtgriscom wrote: post #111
dmoy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass. Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine. Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg. Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other in…

Why separate, split, and then combine? Why not combine and then split?

In many recipes you must whip the whites, and they must be completely yolk free.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#170

Post by sevensor »

Daneel_ wrote: post #141
sevensor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I stand corrected !
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