This is one of the reasons why my recipes standardize on ingredients you can source from any grocery store, and not on specific brand items. I will include it in the recipe as a shortcut, but then show the substitution methods if such an item is unavailable or unreliable.
Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
691–700 of 721 posts
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I'm currently reading 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and the author talks about this exact dilemma. She attributed the difference to the fact that box-cake recipes tend to use oil for the fat, while recipes from scratch often prefer butter. The way oil can fully coat the flour changes how the gluten chains develop during baking, which changes the texture.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
> 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...
I'm not sure about that, I've resisted buying those brands and it seems poor form to open them in the supermarket just to check.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
Blame the European regulators who decided that it was no longer necessary to have standard pack sizes. Pack sizes were regulated in 1975 for volume measures (wine, beer, spirits, vinegar, oils, milk, water, and fruit juice) and in 1980 for weights (butter, cheese, salt, sugar, cereals [flour, pasta, rice, prepared cereals], dried fruits and vegetables, coffee, and a number of other things). In 2007, all of that was r…
Ironically it seems (from memory, I've not researched it deeply) that continental butter has not changed from 250g, whereas the British brands have moved first to 200g. I could understand if they switched to 225g as essentially a half-pound block, but 200g isn't any closer to an useful Imperial measure than 250g.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
Another dimension we have in France: most butter in 82% fat, but if are not careful you might buy so-called butter with much lower fat. Awful taste on morning toasts, ruined pastries.
82% seems the norm here too, good to know this. Anything lower is labelled 'spread' (based on a very quick search, maybe not always true here). Oddly specific, so maybe there's regulation at play. We prefer French butter for the quality and because it comes in the correct size.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#696Earlier 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?
We have salted butter for the table, and unsalted for baking. We don't bake often enough to want unopened packs if we can avoid it.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea
Yeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually th…
I'm wondering if this isn't mostly an American thing. I have no qualms admitting that my recipes are from other recipes, but I modified them
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very interesting. I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods. I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune th…
If you see this reply, may I ask a favor? The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon. I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT…
By chance, someone posted the text on Reddit two years ago,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/ydmncf/searchi... ("From Better homes and gardens cookbook 1953")
The one in this very specific 1953 cookbook is not an egg-based custard, but uses as a thickening agent condensed mushroom soup, from a can.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "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".
But "when people complain that the purpose of packaging is to fool consumers, they are being stupid" is something you can deduce from that.
Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
The entire point of my comment is that besides changes in size, there are also changes in ingredients.