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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#421

Post by antonyh »

indrora wrote: post #300
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…

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…

Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#422

Post by sersi »

malfist wrote: post #282
yAak wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

And box mix tend to be overly sweet (at least from my limited experience tasting then when I was a student in the us)

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#423

Post by dmesg »

kortilla wrote: post #363
teekert wrote: post #361

Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.' Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet. Just learn to bake properly base…

Do you mill your own flour? Or do you just use some boxes commercial mix like a filthy commoner?

Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#424

Post by greazy »

bob1029 wrote: post #395

Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference wo…

> Ive scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.

Care to share this recipe? Sounds wild.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#425

Post by sersi »

phil21 wrote: post #299
yAak wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder what is the proportion of that according to countries. In France, there's a label "fait maison" that's supposed to limit how much the baker or restaurateur rely on pre made mix. But besides this if a professional baker uses a premade mix, how do they differentiate themselves (but then I guess from my experience in the US some shops mostly compete on decoration and not taste)

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#426

Post by smcl »

kortilla wrote: post #365
smcl wrote: post #356

> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and > ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller > than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, > whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some…

Wait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.

Honestly I don't mind if people don't make everything themselves as there's always going to be a line where you go "well I'm not doing that" (you're probably not milling your own flour, growing your own wheat, milking your own cows, raising your own chickens etc...).

I just think they've tried to reach a bit far for a human interest angle - it's already annoying that customers are getting shafted, that's important! We don't need to spin a yarn about little Granny Scroggins cakes disappearing from the local church fair.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#427

Post by pjc50 »

qlm wrote: post #397
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”. Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids,…

I’m in the UK too and you can buy measuring cups here easily. It doesn’t mean “a mug from your cupboard”. It _is_ a volume measurement. I do agree it doesn’t make sense for things that aren’t fluid-like.

Note that UK measuring cups are not exactly the same size as US measuring cups, just as US and UK gallons are not the same size. Yes, this is infuriating. Fortunately you can buy US ones over the internet, or convert it into metric like a normal person.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#428

Post by mrweasel »

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.

I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#429

Post by sdoering »

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…

> Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch.

Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum.

> Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise

It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining.

> To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience

Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting.

About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit.

I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor".

Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap.

> Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives

Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#430

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

indrora wrote: post #300
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…

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…

>bigger than the 110g sticks

There are four 110g sticks per package because each one is one quarter of the classic one pound (454g) package of butter, rounded down.

The European equivalent is a 125g package, which is flatter and wider than your square-profile 110g sticks.

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