bit rot, but with recipes reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
So....just rot then?
more like a funny sort of dependency drift
Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
331–340 of 721 posts
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Meanwhile, here in Canada I've never seen "sticks of butter", only the large bricks. They're the same size as American ones, and labeled as 454g, but I only recently found out that in some places in the US, they cut them in fours. Before that, the phrase didn't mean anything to me, and I thought it referred to throwing the whole brick in. The smaller 250g packages also exist, but they're rare. I can't guarantee that…
Some American butter is wrapped in wax paper as regular sticks with measurement markers on it so that it is easy to measure. Plenty of large bricks though.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#333Much 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.
The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:
> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.
Is this what passes for a reference now?
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.
I keep four to six flours in my pantry, but none of them contain additives like baking powder. It’s so trivial to add the appropriate amount when it’s called for, I have trouble understanding why self-rising flour would be a popular product.
What are your flour varieties?
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Saturated fat is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile sugar is as bad or even worse than people think it is.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#336Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#337Much 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…
> 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. It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years. It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit…
> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access!
I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#338Earlier 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…
Agreed, but you claimed above that:
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#339When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are. They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minu…
In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#340Much 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…
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.
I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.