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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#671

Post by vidarh »

account42 wrote: post #642
vidarh wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then we'd need to measure Most butter here (and in a number of other countries) have measuring lines on the pack itself in 50g increments, so while I agree with you it's a nuisance to have an open one to deal with, the measurement part is usually a matter of using a knife along the marked line... If the "certain brands" you refer to don't have those measuring lines, though, then a pox on them...

Do people here not always have an open pack of butter in their fridge?

For my part: Only around christmas-time, as it's the only time I bake.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#672

Post by account42 »

vachina wrote: post #123
brianwawok wrote: post #3

I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.

In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.

It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler.

Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#673

Post by gwd »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #37
gwd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to meas…

Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch. Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.

Thanks for that. So there are basically three things he mentions:

1. Emulsifiers actually make the texture better

2. The flour they use has had some extra steps

3. They can use industrial machinery to smash their shortening and flour together in a way that's really not possible in a kitchen, that does make the texture better.

As someone else has said, it should in theory be possible to buy "better" flour; and you could buy emulsifiers, or use more egg yolk (which has a natural emulsifier), or use Crisco (which the video says has emulsifiers in it). So it's really the last one that's not easily replicate-able at home.

There is one thing he keeps repeating which I disagree with: "You're not going to be able to do a better job of engineering than the experts at Duncan Hines." Yes, both Duncan Hines and I are optimizing in part for taste. And I have some constraints compared with Duncan Hines: I don't have industrial grade machinery to mash shortening into flour; I can't experiment with and precisely measure an arbitrary number of potentially exotic ingredients.

But Duncan Hines has several additional constraints they're optimizing against which don't apply to me: They have to make it simple enough for an average person to make. They have to aim for a "median" palate. They have to make it shelf-stable for years. They have the pressure to shave pennies off the cost (as evidenced by TFA), which may mean (e.g.) buying cheaper chocolate or using a lightly lower quality fat than would be ideal.

So I disagree that it's a given that Duncan Hines' cake mix will be better than something I can make from scratch.

I will, however, concede that there are reasonable advantages to using a "commercial base".

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#674

Post by account42 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #596
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…

> I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens. Is this satire? Do you do your cooking in an industrial cafeteria kitchen? Do you have a family of 20 people?

Reads to me like he's doing an extreme version of the meal prep trend.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#675

Post by account42 »

lifeformed wrote: post #200

I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.

I have made many cakes which is how I know that yes, a basic cake is pretty trivial.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#676

Post by moolcool »

account42 wrote: post #657
moolcool wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're already reliant on corporations for your family recipes.

People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#677

Post by account42 »

sersi wrote: post #442
julianz wrote: post #236

This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.

I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them). Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-…

Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#678

Post by moolcool »

bruce511 wrote: post #189
throw0101a wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking. Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?

I really hope that's said somewhat sarcastically. I pessimistically assume not though. You're right. To do things you need tools. If you're gonna bake, a scale is a useful tool. It's a pretty small hurdle to jump. I guess it's funny that on this site there are long threads about rooting phones, or restoring old hardware, or using assembler to patch old software, but also threads which laud the use of cake-mixes and t…

It's about convenience and nostalgia.

This reminds me of the thread where people were telling the founders of Dropbox that they'd fail, because it's "so easy" to just set up a Linux box with rsync.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#679

Post by account42 »

teekert wrote: post #361

Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.' Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet. Just learn to bake properly base…

> pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs.

If you're too poor to afford an appropriate amount of eggs maybe.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#680

Post by [deleted] »

bruce511 wrote: post #175
jaggederest wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set. Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more. Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year ol…

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