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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#621

Post by ProfessorLayton »

com2kid wrote: post #281
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…

Consistency is hard, but quality isn't. If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly). Quality improvements are easy . Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consist…

Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?

Especially since there's differing levels of quality for boxed cakes too! My local chocolate maker in the SFBAY makes fancy chocolate and cake/brownie mixes, and honestly they're great. The brownie mix specifically comes out better than what I can get in a typical bakery in here in SF.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#622

Post by fluoridation »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #618
fluoridation wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think that's a known quantity. Only a child would think a bag of chips is completely filled with chips. In fact, I remember first hearing about this in some science show or something; it hadn't occurred to me before then that the bags were mostly empty, it was just the way chips were packaged.

>If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?

But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break.

Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#623

Post by [deleted] »

Balgair wrote: post #67
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…

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

[deleted]

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#624

Post by Aloha »

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 have, I even have one on the shelf waiting for the occasion to make it.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#625

Post by ufo »

nkrisc wrote: post #137
rimprobablyly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no they don't.

What’s the difference between making the mix yourself, or just buying the exact same ingredients already mixed at the correct ratio?

Commercial cake mix is ultraprocessed,you likely won't find those ingredients in your pantry. The flour is bleached, they add emulsifiers you wouldn't find at home, the vegetable shortening is jydrogenated, etc.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#627

Post by com2kid »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #621
com2kid wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistency is hard, but quality isn't. If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly). Quality improvements are easy . Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consist…

Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either? Especially since there's differing levels of quality for boxed cakes too! My local chocolate maker in the SFBAY makes fancy chocolate and cake/brownie mixes, and honestly they're great. The brownie mix specifically comes out better than what I can get in a typical…

> Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?

Except the conversation is about Betty Crocker mixes, which are the very definition of built to cost.

Also for whatever reason when I've used the bougie organic box mixes, the results have been very middling. e.g. not baking, but I can make better pancakes from scratch than what comes out of a bag of Birch Benders.

Related, the bougie brands with higher quality ingredients tend to not use as fancy of chemistry in their mixes, so you get better ingredients but you don't get the advanced chemistry.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#628

Post by kop316 »

bruce511 wrote: post #248
kop316 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you read the article, they address that: "She now calls them 'unusable.' She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, 'but out of principle, I just can’t.'" As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and sibl…

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…

> I get the nostalgic aspect.

While you may understand the nostalgic aspect from a logical level, I don't think you understand it beyond that. This next line:

> But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.

To me anyways really indicates that. I know there are a zillion from-scratch recipes online and in books and in other media. That isn't the point.

> If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.

Once again, I think you are totally missing the point. I think this captures why it's a big deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8TEJtQRhw Betty Crocker is effectively doing that.

Without understanding it at more of emotional level, I can see why this doesn't resonate with you. Unfortunately, that also means it is unlikely that you will able to understand why it is a big deal and why other folks are arguing with you the way they are.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#629

Post by pitched »

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #567
jancsika wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you got that flipped. This is two people relating to each other. That’s what happens when it all goes right.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#630

Post by moolcool »

bruce511 wrote: post #179
moolcool wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food. I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat. My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes. When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?

Some products are packaged so that one box constitutes one unit, and when they change that units size out of corporate stinginess, it’s inconvenient.

It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.

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