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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#481

Post by kragen »

Ray20 wrote: post #472
kragen wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage…

If these people were so smart, they wouldn't be so poor.

Lots of people are both smart and poor, but getting smarter can help you get richer.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#482

Post by ricardobeat »

malfist wrote: post #279
schiffern wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. Surfactants/emulsifiers, from that list, have been connected to leaky gut ('emulsifying' protective mucus) which causes inflammation. This is hypothesized to be one of the mechanisms by which ultra-processed food causes a constellation of diseases. Be snobby about cake ingredients. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/ https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com…

Leaky gut is a myth. It's used to scare people and sell things. If you don't believe me, feel free to read it's Wikipedia page.

"Leaky gut" might be a myth, but emulsifiers' impact on gut health is not. A steady stream of studies [1] and publications on this [2] has been coming out, since the role of our microbiome became more clear.

[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#483

Post by lm28469 »

wccrawford wrote: post #480
ricardobeat wrote: post #475

> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil > whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.

It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately. The answer is probably to make your ow…

> There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch"

Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#484

Post by kruador »

flyinghamster wrote: post #381
inferiorhuman wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing. A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot. The issues surrounding volumetric measurements for dry goods is an entirely separate matter. 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots.

Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones. One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoo…

Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.

My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#485

Post by regentbowerbird »

wil421 wrote: post #478
rtaylorgarlock wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cut the sugar in grandma's limoncello by 30% and still end up with rocket fuel syrup which my friends think will cause sleep problems and diabeetus

The yeast eats the sugar and turns it into alcohol. More sugar more alcohol, grandma’s version sounds good.

Alcohol concentrations over 20% kill yeast, so adding sugar to distilled spirits will not create more alcohol.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#486

Post by [deleted] »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #464
zarzavat wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather eat a cake that has the texture of a cake rather than some food science abomination. It's corporations that have taught you to desire the wrong definition of a cake. 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 ingred…

Using limited equipment is not a virtue. And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal. Let people like what they like.

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#487

Post by wink »

dimensional_dan wrote: post #345
dghlsakjg wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fun fact: in other parts of the world it's not called "all purpose", and I don't mean translations.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#488

Post by [deleted] »

mgiampapa wrote: post #368
phil21 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. 95% of bakerie…

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#489

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #414
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing. I understand that other countries (probably North American ones) use the same system too, so thought I was clarifying, not scaring. > A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of me…

I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age. Right, but a cup is not an imperial unit of measure and metric cups didn't really catch on in the UK. So if you're looking at an older British recipe that references cups, good luck. any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots". This is also a bad idea as common sizes for certain things c…

Can't recall seeing any British recipe that uses cups so the difference between imperial and metric cups is irrelevant to us.

At least with something like "5 apricots", it should be obvious to the cook if they've got really small, big or varying sizes. Meanwhile, the "cup" measurement can vary depending on the order of which you put the apricots into the cup - do you put the smallest fruit in first, or the biggest?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#490

Post by ricardobeat »

joncrocks wrote: post #434
apparent wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to push back on this slightly, I'm sure I've watched Youtube videos with someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking. As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting. This d…

Do you have an example of these unreachable ingredients? The main ones - dextrose, whey, emulsifiers - can be found at any supermarket as "bread improver" or "dough conditioner" mix.

Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.

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