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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#511

Post by Freak_NL »

shmeeed wrote: post #455
xandrius wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.

In many parts of the world, that's absolutely a thing grandpas do :)

Totally. An Austrian fellow (who was indeed a grandfather) we rented a cottage from did this and told us about when I asked about what he was going to do with the hundreds of apples falling from his ancient apple tree. Apparently it's legal there to distil your own eau de vie at a non-commercial scale. We went home with a complementary empty plastic water bottle filled with his Schnaps.

It used to be a thing in the Netherlands too, but the lack of legality made that a much less popular hobby.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#513

Post by wpm »

alexdbird wrote: post #438
unwind wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do, but nobody seems to have posted it yet. The exact box in the article (it had a link!) has the following ingredients listed: Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Sugar, Corn Syrup, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Leavening (baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Modified Corn Starch, Palm Oil, Corn…

This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol. The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't. Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.

Oh no! Scary looking ingredients! That must mean they’re bad!

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#514

Post by wil421 »

regentbowerbird wrote: post #485
wil421 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahh, yes I forgot it’s not fermented you just use vodka or something stronger with the lemon peels.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#515

Post by IAmBroom »

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…

One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read.

Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#516

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

MisterSandman wrote: post #499
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive made great cookies from 100 year old recipes. Why do would i want a carbon copy of a store cookie. Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.

Can we stop calling things you find weird “American?” Like Jesus Christ, Europe isn’t some special land where everyone makes food from scratch and capitalism doesn’t exist. I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.

Cake mix is not only an American invention, predominantly sold by American companies (even in the European market), featuring traditionally American baked goods. (Pound cake, brownies and chocolate chip)

Looking for cake mix history in sweden descibe its initial import from USA and England as American style cookies and brownies became popular.

Its American association is well founded. And i did not use the word wierd. I simply pointed out that this ubiquity of "cake mix" baked goods is not reflected in my experience, and may be more concentrated in USA.

In particular in take issue with phrasing cake mix as "family recipe" as even the brands i can find at my store are younger than one generation, and has nowhere near the cultural footprint that they seem to have in USA.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#517

Post by inferiorhuman »

kruador wrote: post #484
flyinghamster wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somewhe…

  Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml.
Well there's a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting to go down. I knew that Australian tablespoons (20 mL) were significantly different from US tablespoons. I didn't know that UK tablespoons were a whole different beast (14.2 mL), nor did I realize US tablespoons aren't quite 15 mL, and in fact my tablespoon measures are marked 15 mL. 15 mL is handily 1/16 of a US cup so it's easy enough to translate to 1/4 cup (4 tsbsp) and 1/3 cup (5 tbsp).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablespoon

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#518

Post by bluGill »

mschuster91 wrote: post #494
bluGill wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal. I spend an hour a day cooking, which does add up though-

> I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal. ... if you have a car that's roadworthy enough, time for the drive, money for the fuel, and even then, access to fresh groceries is not a given in the first place because there's no place selling them. 39 million Americans live in food deserts [1], and in places that are not food deserts, actual groceries can simply be unaffordable. And then, once you have t…

Slow down, the vast majority of those eating fast food are not poor. They are not living in a good desert. They have car anyway, and access to groceries isn't a problem. They have a house or apartment with a working kitchen so they can store everything.

Costco is cheap, but so is Aldi with much smaller package sizes - I don't have a costco membership because Aldi is so close it isn't worth going often (we go about once a year, but with a friend who has a membership). Every place I've lived have also had discount grocery stores (Most Americans like me do not live in a good desert) - and the fast food just down the street still had a lot of customers.

The above are the people I'm talking about shocking me. They have the means to get cheaper and better meals at hand, but they don't use it.

Don't get me wrong, we should have conversations about poverty. However lets not mistake the majority situation for poverty in conversations. There are people who have all means to do eat better available and choose not to.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#519

Post by IAmBroom »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #271
ajross wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update. To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one . And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly. "Stay in your lane" is not the way to add…

But it is.

Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother.

OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#520

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

beacon294 wrote: post #509
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem cake mix in stores my whole life I checked my lagest local grocery store chain and they do have one brand of cake mixes. They never really crossed my mind before. Chocolate chip and two types of pundcake.... though that's both among the simplest baking recipies so i still don't quite see the point. There's also pre-made pie dough, that i could see using.

Pie dough is quite simple, but I imagine they use some chemistry to improve, as per the other food chemistry posts...

Yes and no. Its usually butter based dough needing to be kneaded finely and left to rest an hour before use, prefferably pre-baked in pan before adding filling for best result.

You can get it quite quick with a food processor or a kitchenaid mixer, but kneading such a dough by hand and having the time to let rest, flatten with a rolling pin and pre-bake in pan, push pie up a bit in the effort ranking.

So i feel there is real value in quickly putting a pre-flattened doough sheet in a pan, especially if some chemistry can skip the pre-bake step.

So i see the appeal much more for this product over pound cake mix which is just four, sugar, egg and leveling agent.

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