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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#551

Post by Pikamander2 »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #297
jedimastert wrote: post #269

For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flou…

A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit. [edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared

I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.

They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes.

I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#552

Post by charles_f »

safety1st wrote: post #351
charles_f wrote: post #119

What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that. With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and choc…

I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.

I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners.

My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.

We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#553

Post by morkalork »

Freak_NL wrote: post #511
shmeeed wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I visited an orchard this weekend and came home with a bottle of plum brandy. Seems like every family of central european descent has a recipe.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#554

Post by dolmen »

waste_monk wrote: post #366
encoderer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my best to update several of my family recipes. A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”. This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905? This site [1] has some interesting info: [1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine…

As "egg-sized" refers to volume, what quantity of butter would that be?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#555

Post by leoedin »

Theodores wrote: post #307
lifeformed wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am loving this thread, and how cake is suddenly up there as a controversial, polarising topic. Respect for working in a bakery, just hope you haven't got too many burn scars on your forearms from doing long night shifts. I am in broad agreement with you and I appreciate the difficulties of making a consistent product, particularly when there are variables in temperature, seasonal availability of ingredients, lots o…

I think in the UK “shop bought cake” and “home made cake” are basically 2 different things that look kind of similar.

Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a distinctive taste and texture which I really don’t like. If I made a cake at home and it ended up tasting like something from the supermarket I’d consider it a failure.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#556

Post by 14 »

codingdave wrote: post #541
jaggederest wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix. It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated fl…

Why would you try to imitate a boxed cake mix? They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.

Familiarity. Many grew up eating the boxed cakes so that is what represents what a cake should taste like. And in my opinion the taste and texture of many boxed cakes is good. Plus the simplicity of adding an egg, some oil and water makes it very appealing to many.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#557

Post by xav0989 »

tavavex wrote: post #320
indrora wrote: post #300

Earlier 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…

I’ve seen them in stores in Canada, but they’re usually more expensive than the 454g blocks. Expensive enough that it’s usually better to buy the block and portion it as needed.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#558

Post by ajross »

justinrubek wrote: post #542
IAmBroom wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Christma…

How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.

> How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature.

It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread.

You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#559

Post by b800h »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #413
thaumasiotes wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Also, Hershey's "chocolate" tastes of vomit due to butyric acid from lipolysis

Britisher here. I was disgusted to discover this when a colleague brought some from the US. I don't understand how anyone eats / ate this stuff.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#560

Post by syncsynchalt »

philistine wrote: post #330
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…

Typical Americana. Cutting up and packaging in extra foil what could simply be sold as a larger brick. See also, milk bags.

Bricks won't fit in our butter trays. And it'd be an ordeal to open a brick, quarter it, then put the opened 3/4 of the brick back into cold storage until needed again.

Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.

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