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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#341

Post by guappa »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #332
tavavex wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And here we use the markers to know how many grams that part is… how silly of us!

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#342

Post by VagabundoP »

Freak_NL wrote: post #337
jancsika wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

She archived the repo after that.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#343

Post by guappa »

lifeformed wrote: post #245
bruce511 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique. Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that. If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really. Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But proce…

What I am calling snobby is to look down on grandma's cooking because she used processed foods. Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking. In the US Midwest a tradition is to use a box cake mix as a base and add to it flavorful additions, like homemade jams, fruits, whipped cream, etc. If I went to someone's house and their grandma served to me, it would be extremely snobbish to…

> Normal, everyday families around the world use processed foods in their cooking

Do you have a source? I really haven't met anyone using cake mixes to make cakes.

But if you mean they use butter instead of milking a cow directly and producing the butter then yes, they use processed food.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#344

Post by formerly_proven »

lifeformed wrote: post #188
bruce511 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#345

Post by dimensional_dan »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #277
dml2135 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.

Standard flour? Which standard? There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very di…

> all purpose flour

Use that one. It's flour, but like for all purposes. You can make cake with it fine.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#346

Post by eesmith »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #264
joshstrange wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.

Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#347

Post by AlecSchueler »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #37
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…

Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch. Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.

Relevant content begins at 03:40

But I'm not sure why they think I can't but the same emulsifiers etc online or at the local Asian grocery store.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#348

Post by AlecSchueler »

sniffers wrote: post #192
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.

What's in the box is unknown to most people. Unknowable, even. They are surprisingly complex mixes.

Don't they have ingredients lists or is that a very European thing?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#349

Post by benstein »

jancsika wrote: post #303
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…

> 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…

LOL fork

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#350

Post by campital »

lifeformed wrote: post #188
bruce511 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

"A Man Ate Expired Boxed Cake Mix. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." (Frozen Hot Sauce, iykyk)
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