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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#651

Post by account42 »

lifeformed wrote: post #245
bruce511 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique. Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that. If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really. Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But proce…

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 would like the emphasize "consistency".

This matters when you are trying to sell a product, not so much when you are cooking for friends and family as long as you get into the ballpark which isn't really that hard. Little variances and surprises just make home cooking more interesting.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#652

Post by account42 »

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…

> None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.

If the US can make you pay the income tax difference when living abroad then I fail to see why we can't do the same for companies using these kinds of schemes.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#653

Post by account42 »

sfn42 wrote: post #360
komali2 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper and nicer to buy from simple graineries than from some faceless megacorp that's probably just Nestle, that's shrinking your boxes and not telling you as if you're a moron and can't tell. Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.

In Norway these products usually don't have powdered fats. They will typically require that you add egg(s) and butter/margarin, maybe milk etc. Here's the ingredient list for Toro Brownies, translated by me. Sugar, wheat flour, reduced-fat cocoa, baking powder(calcium phosphate, sodium carbonate), coffee, salt, vanillin I'm not sure about the fat reduced cocoa, for all I know that might just be what I think of as nor…

But then there is even less point in buying the branded mix rather than individual ingredients that you can use for various recipes with ratios that you like.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#654

Post by account42 »

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…

"Companies don't use packaging to fool consumers" is not something that you can deduce from "some customers are confused about a specific kind of packaging".

And even for chips, "bag of air" isn't the only viable packaging method. Of course others aren't without tradeoffs either.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#655

Post by account42 »

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.

They could just sell the full package like they used to before if they don't want to change the packaging. The entire point of reducing the content is to mislead the consumer into not noticing a price increase.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#656

Post by account42 »

fluoridation wrote: post #616
citizenkeen wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

I agree that the precise atoms don't matter that much, but disagree that you can't have the same cake again. You just need to believe that you can.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#657

Post by account42 »

moolcool wrote: post #630
bruce511 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that is a self-induced problem or at least one that you can avoid if you take care to not become reliant on some corporation for your "family" recipe.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#658

Post by account42 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #277
dml2135 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is why it makes sense to bake from standard ingredients like flour that have many different uses, instead of a processed box that can only be used to make one thing.

Standard flour? Which standard? There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very di…

> self rising flour

That's just another unnecessary mix you can buy individually.

> That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.

Flour types are not up to some corporation's marketing team. And for home cooking they don't really matter as much as you are implying. Just get the types best suited for the most common thing(s) you are making and make substitutes for the rest.

Also, there's going to be one type that is always stocked more than others. That's your standard flour. You can use it for most recipes (cake and bread) just fine.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#659

Post by account42 »

wpm wrote: post #513
alexdbird wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol. The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't. Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.

Oh no! Scary looking ingredients! That must mean they’re bad!

Oh no! Comment on a long list of ingredients! That must mean they're making the argument I think they are!

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#660

Post by account42 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #385
unwind wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do, but nobody seems to have posted it yet. The exact box in the article (it had a link!) has the following ingredients listed: Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Sugar, Corn Syrup, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Leavening (baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Modified Corn Starch, Palm Oil, Corn…

> substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients Why are you limited to what's in your pantry? Just get the extra ingredients online.

Or don't. Or add different additives. When cooking "from scratch" you have the option to make what you like and not what some corporation has determined sells the best. A lot of the extra ingredients are only needed for the latter goal but not for the former.
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