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

291–300 of 721 posts

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#291

Post by [deleted] »

jaggederest wrote: post #163
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 fl…

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#292

Post by tomhow »

estimator7292 wrote: post #10
senkora wrote: post #5

This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box. Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?

[flagged]

Please don't use HN for ideological battle. This is clearly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#293

Post by citizenkeen »

bruce511 wrote: post #248
kop316 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you read the article, they address that: "She now calls them 'unusable.' She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, 'but out of principle, I just can’t.'" As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and sibl…

I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from. And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar. Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online. Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see h…

“It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”.

The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering.

I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#294

Post by Theodores »

lifeformed wrote: post #225
cmbuck wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems. A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese. I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of apprecia…

C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe?

Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.

Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.

Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.

Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.

Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#295

Post by brian-armstrong »

bruce511 wrote: post #194
crazygringo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :) "Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me. First World Problems I guess...

It's time to log off lil bro

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#296

Post by avereveard »

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?

While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#297

Post by Eric_WVGG »

jedimastert wrote: post #269

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 flou…

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

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#298

Post by [deleted] »

Balgair wrote: post #67
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…

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#299

Post by phil21 »

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?

Cake mixes almost always come ahead in blind taste tests. Very few bakers short of folks with a lot of volume are doing stuff from scratch.

It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.

Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one.

The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#300

Post by indrora »

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…

Even regional differences in things.

If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.

Post reply on HN