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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#611

Post by unsnap_biceps »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #560
philistine wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fancy butter is sometimes in foil, https://www.kerrygoldusa.com for example

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#612

Post by Dylan16807 »

fireflash38 wrote: post #473
traceroute66 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It _is_ a volume measurement Yawn. Except there's no such thing as a "volume measurement": - The so-called "cups" will have different manufacturing processes, some will be a bit smaller, some will be bit larger. Plastic cups will warp and deform with time. - When measuring dry materials like flour, the amount in your "cup" depends on your usage. Are you weighing sifted flour or flour out of the bag ? Are you accide…

For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate? It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know? At least a gram is a gram…

A nice packed cup can fit like 50% more than a very loose cup. It's a much bigger issue "exact precision".

For eggs, as long as you know the right category of egg it'll be within 10% and that's a lot less of a worry.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#613

Post by cogman10 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #606
cogman10 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment I replied to stated > That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker. I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear.

I'm confused. So you are dismissing them? Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them. If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves. > I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker. I don…

> Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.

> If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.

I don't understand what you mean by "dismissal". When I'm "dismissing" them it is in the context of "you don't need these to make delicious cakes competitive with the box goods." And the reason I'm dismissing is because of availability to a home cook.

It's fair to point out the parent comment was talking about the fear of chemicals in the foods, not a concern I share. I was more writing in terms of whether or not you actually need these ingredients to be successful baking.

I'd further say that, especially with food, there's no strict "bad/good". The ingredients are simply different. While it does impact the final outcome, you likely won't taste much difference if you used canola oil or corn oil in a recipe, for example. Does that make corn or canola bad/good? No, they are just different ingredients that accomplish the same goal. With that in mind, availability becomes a much more important thing to consider. So I can dismiss the need for xanthan gum for a home cook because I know that potato starch will fill the same role while being easy to find in the store. It's more available, not better.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#614

Post by thaumasiotes »

Larrikin wrote: post #155
striking wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...

Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts. Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?

https://pacificwildpick.com/products/square-watermelon-gift-...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#615

Post by fluoridation »

stronglikedan wrote: post #573
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…

> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.

Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#616

Post by fluoridation »

citizenkeen wrote: post #293
bruce511 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the nostalgic aspect. But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from. And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar. Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online. Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see h…

“It’s not a problem for me so I struggle to see why it’s a problem for anybody else”. The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering. I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.

You can't bake the cake you had in your childhood. You already had it. Even if it had all the same atoms in the same positions it would not be the same, because you are not the same.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#617

Post by thaumasiotes »

brnt wrote: post #579
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…

> subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point. You will be surprised to learn that brands have very differently tasting products developed for different markets. Often even under the same name.

> Often even under the same name

This is an issue with Kellogg's cereal and Lay's potato chips in China. They purport to be available. But they're not the same product.

I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a good idea; it entirely defeats the purpose of branding.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#618

Post by thaumasiotes »

fluoridation wrote: post #615
stronglikedan wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.

Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.

You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air.

But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag.

This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#619

Post by glxxyz »

tpmoney wrote: post #144
eulgro wrote: post #11

Why would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it? Oh wait you probably have all of them already.

Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "…

The 15oz (pre-shrinkflation) Betty Crocker mix weighs 432g, 2/3 the weight of your recipe's flour and sugar alone, so your recipe is for a much larger cake.

Wal-Mart's own brand flour is about (Canadian) $C0.15/kg if buying 2.5kg, cake & pastry flour more like 24 cents/kg. Granulated Sugar is C$0.15/kg. I'm not sure where you're buying flour & sugar.

Your most expensive ingredient is butter but you could have easily chosen a recipe without butter. I reckon the cake with butter will be much better than BC's version though.

Other advantages of baking with a recipe are being able to scale the recipe up or down as needed, and always having the ingredients for many different recipes on hand without having to buy a vanilla cake mix, a brownie mix, a pancake mix, a waffle mix etc.

The main advantage of a recipe is tweakability. I find most commercial cakes far too sweet, and when I bake from a recipe I can find the point to which I can reduce the sugar without it becoming too bland.

I don't know whether they're harmful but I'm quite happy to cook a cake without Propylene glycol, Xanthan gum, cellulose gum, sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, and monoesters of fatty acids

I've always been baffled by the popularity of pre-made recipe boxes. Maybe useful if I was camping or something, but not when I have access to an actual kitchen.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#620

Post by thaumasiotes »

Finnucane wrote: post #529
snthd wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555) > Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American c…

Note that today, one can easily find cake flour that isn't chemically bleached. Also, shortening manufacturers have gone to fully-hydrogenated oils, rather than partially hydrogenated, to reduce the amount of trans-fats. But some are still using palm oil, so it's not a total win.

I was just in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where, just like you'd expect in a museum, 30-40% of the space is devoted to signs explaining what you should think about current political issues. There was one "exhibit" devoted solely to convincing you to do more dark-sky activism.

Even in that context, they couldn't bring themselves to recommend against palm oil. Their sign on that topic remarked that palm oil requires much less land per unit of oil produced than other oils, making it a pro-environment product.

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