311–320 of 721 posts
Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.
Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.
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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 doze…
The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.
If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
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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 eve…
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
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>> 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 r…
Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things.
Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
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…
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country. You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
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If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor. Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. S…
Nothing in this comment suggests anything bad about them, just that you can do it a different way. If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason.
Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.
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…
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country. You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
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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 can't guarantee that the sticks don't exist anywhere, but I've lived in several cities all over the country and I've never spotted anything like that