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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#281

Post by com2kid »

lifeformed wrote: post #198
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…

I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost. People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in yo…

Consistency is hard, but quality isn't.

If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).

Quality improvements are easy.

Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)

> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?

Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#282

Post by malfist »

yAak wrote: post #249
lifeformed wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch. Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?

Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch.

But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.

Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#283

Post by myself248 »

gus_massa wrote: post #83
mh- wrote: post #4

> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie…

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.

You can just buy small eggs, and use them for fractional eggs.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#284

Post by kbelder »

neilv wrote: post #13
mh- wrote: post #4

> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie…

I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that... From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different. My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, famil…

My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.

The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#285

Post by bb88 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #126
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…

She's upset that the recipes are different If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-…

That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.

I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#287

Post by nicbou »

aidenn0 wrote: post #263
julianz wrote: post #236

This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.

In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.

That makes sense since it's an American dessert. Germany seemingly only produces the worst possible version of American bread and butter popcorn.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#288

Post by what »

llbbdd wrote: post #254
dml2135 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Sysco a name that you associate with good food? In my mind they mostly supply chain restaurants and prisons.

"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.

Yeah, no. I definitely noticed when the kitchen manager was fired and they started serving reheated Sysco food instead. It’s not good at all.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#289

Post by FearNotDaniel »

nvader wrote: post #191
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…

After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst... This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.

Yes, except for this part:

> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale

This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#290

Post by rtpg »

joshvm wrote: post #171
zurtri wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier. A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (se…

I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.

But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.

We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.

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