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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#581

Post by apparent »

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…

> someone who bake cakes for a living who said they used boxed mixture for most of their baking.

Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.

> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker

Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#582

Post by [deleted] »

oliwarner wrote: post #575

> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. Passing down a box mixture as a "recipe" seems really alien to me in the UK. Measuring flour, sugar and spice isn't rocket surgery. What other branded products do you guys depend on for basic cooking? Campbell's soup had a moment here postwar.

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#583

Post by maebert »

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…

I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds".

I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#584

Post by RandomBacon »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #255
nixosbestos wrote: post #125

I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so , so exhausting.

Huh?

Don't feed the idiological troll.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#585

Post by nrclark »

SamBam wrote: post #251
lifeformed wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost. People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in yo…

Totally false, in large part because a real cake recipe is not usually just a collection of dry ingredients and an egg, the way Betty Crocker usually is. Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg. I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my r…

Agreed for flavor - using good ingredients makes a huge difference. But texture is also a big part of how we experience food, and box cake's texture is very hard to beat IMO (at least I've never been able to do it).

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#586

Post by Theodores »

imtringued wrote: post #335
Theodores wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe? Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first. Cheese is worst thing eve…

Saturated fat is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile sugar is as bad or even worse than people think it is.

Your comment makes as much sense as "Tobacco is nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Meanwhile coal fires are as bad or even worse than people think it is."

If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#587

Post by bigmanjon »

unwind wrote: post #359
joshvm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier. A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (se…

Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about. Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more…

Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#588

Post by OtherShrezzing »

hapless wrote: post #505
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's despite Europe having 2x the population of North America.

The EU contains about 30% more people than the USA alone. (450MM vs 340MM) North America overall contains many more people than the EU. (340 + 129 + 40 for just USA, Mexico, Canada, plus another ~50MM in smaller countries. 560ish total)

The EU is only around 2/3 of the population of the continent of Europe.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#589

Post by nixosbestos »

RandomBacon wrote: post #584
kurtis_reed wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh?

Don't feed the idiological troll.

Suuuuure, grocery store consolidation, and the consolidation of farming, and processed food has NOTHING to do with their ability to arbitrarily implement shrinkflation, with consumers having few or no other options. Also, kindly fuck off with the name-calling.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#590

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #543
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> pound cake This isn't meant to reply to the rest of the comment, but as an American I don't think I've ever seen or eaten a pound cake mix? The recipe is the name... You either make it for $1 or you go to the grocery/bakery and grab the $2 pound cake sitting on the counter. Most mixes people buy (at least around here) are brownies, cookies, and spongecake.

I use poundcake as a synonym to spongecake. The ingredients and process are the same, with variations large enough between recipes to accommodate both. (Cupcake, chocolate cake, lemom cake, some apple cakes all use the same basic dough composition too)

Poundcake vary greatly beyond a "pound".

If anything, spongecake is more strictly defined, originally not using leveling agents, relying on the air bubbles introduced in the beating of the eggs.

But thats semantics. Perhaps spongecake is more recognised as the umbrella term.

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