Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes • Hacker News Board

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#181

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #175

jaggederest wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fl…

>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more. Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year ol…

They produce different textures and tastes.

If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.

But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.

Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#182

Post by bruce511 » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

brian-armstrong wrote: post #43

pessimizer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.

But these bakers don't want "cake mix", they want the specific Betty Crocker cake mix

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#183

Post by sniffers » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

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…

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#184

Post by kragen » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #77

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.

I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program. He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average. The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county res…

I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.

My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.

But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#185

Post by dmoy » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

saltcured wrote: post #136

dtgriscom wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.

^ yea pretty much this

I'm not 100% sure but whenever I've tried to reduce an egg without splitting first, it always ends up with a super wrong amount of yolk

I could also just be bad at it, idk

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#186

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #179

moolcool wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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?

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. 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?

Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly.

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.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#187

Post by rpdillon » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #179

moolcool wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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?

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. 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?

When recipes that we use called for a box of something. You seem argumentative about this, but it's easy to understand.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#188

Post by lifeformed » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #175

jaggederest wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fl…

>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more. Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year ol…

Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.

Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.

Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#189

Post by bruce511 » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:27 AM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #177

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper. Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.

> In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking. Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?

I really hope that's said somewhat sarcastically. I pessimistically assume not though.

You're right. To do things you need tools. If you're gonna bake, a scale is a useful tool. It's a pretty small hurdle to jump.

I guess it's funny that on this site there are long threads about rooting phones, or restoring old hardware, or using assembler to patch old software, but also threads which laud the use of cake-mixes and treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#190

Post by sniffers » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #179

moolcool wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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?

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. 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?

I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.