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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#561

Post by [deleted] »

14 wrote: post #556
codingdave wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#562

Post by rtkwe »

xandrius wrote: post #387
kortilla wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.

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.

On the other hand I wish there was a legal avenue for home distilling like there is for homebrewing. Beer doesn't interest me much but the ridiculous balance of a reflux still is fascinating to me.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#563

Post by rtkwe »

greazy wrote: post #424
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.

Just take your current favorite recipe and make more breading for the coating. That doesn't sound like there's much to actually do there.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#564

Post by rtkwe »

Pikamander2 wrote: post #551
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The holes are for safety to let the steam escape so it doesn't all come out right where you're opening it and potentially burn your hand and stirring half way through just evens out the natural hot spots that occur in microwaves. Neither really affects the taste significantly.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#565

Post by matthewdgreen »

jaggederest wrote: post #163
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…

> 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…

There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#566

Post by Tor3 »

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…

Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.

Baking cakes from scratch is easy. Even I could make an apple cake very quickly with a recipe (I quickly found one online, but I could as well just have used the recipe book from the bookshelf), and I had a nice cake ready shortly after, never having made an apple cake before. My wife said "I don't have the time, you do it". And I did.

Mix? Full of additives and whatnot, I bet. I won't eat that.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#567

Post by gdbsjjdn »

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…

When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#568

Post by brnt »

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.

My wife worked for a company that does this (for many large brands that you know of. Yes it always surprised me that they even farmed this out, they really only do marketing themselves anymore). Was a real eye opener.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#569

Post by marssaxman »

llbbdd wrote: post #150
marssaxman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that attitude, you might as well just buy a finished cake from the store!

You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we c…

This strikes me as the same sort of semantic game one plays when claiming that "humans are actually fish"; while technically true, this drains the term of its utility.

While I take your point about economy, in my kitchen it would actually take less time to make a cake from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, because we always have them - whereas buying a Betty Crocker mix would require a trip to a grocery store, and not the convenient one around the corner I usually visit.

Nor are the results entirely fungible: I'd always prefer to avoid ingesting preservatives, artificial flavors, corn syrup, etc.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#570

Post by Ir0nMan »

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…

It sounds like she has been claiming that the recipe that is literally printed on the side of the box has actually been "her" recipe for all these years.
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