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 crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.
I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.
Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. 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.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
> 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.
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.
A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.
I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.
But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.
We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
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 things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.
If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason.
Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
> She's upset that the recipes are different, but [...]
That is such an entitled nerd attitude. "Someone else is inconvenienced by my obvious improvements, but clearly they are wrong."
Imagine if someone came by and "standardized" all your build scripting to use the same command line parser and all your CI recipes blew up. Yeah, it's like that. People have jobs to do, even if you don't think those jobs are important. And they've spent years (or likely decades in this particular case) doing their own process improvements and optimization work.
The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update.
To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.
"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
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 chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> 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 flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
>> 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 old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.
I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...
But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.
Surfactants/emulsifiers, from that list, have been connected to leaky gut ('emulsifying' protective mucus) which causes inflammation. This is hypothesized to be one of the mechanisms by which ultra-processed food causes a constellation of diseases.
Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch.
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
> Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe
Is this a troll? I thought it was pretty well understood that processed food is linked with eating and nutritional issues. I have personally found a strong correlation between food quality and the lack of gums, modified starches, and other artificial ingredients.
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe?
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.
Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
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 processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
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 think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is".
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.
But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.
Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
> 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.
That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? Something tells me this is about that bias people have, the one where long chemical names are all bad, because they're chemicals, and the only good chemicals one may use is ones that are common enough to receive a non-intimidating normal name. It's all chemistry all the way down.
If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor.
Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.
Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
> 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?
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 siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.
I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
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 here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
“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.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly.
You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months.
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.
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 different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour.
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.
Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another.
For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on.
All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good.
So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry.
And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions.
I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.
It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.
When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?
It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
2 eggs
¼c. water
⅓c. vegetable oil
and the included packet of Hershey's syrup
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)
As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
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 measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
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:
Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.
And then can still get it. But noooo "opening 2 boxes" is a hurdle too far...
Apparently the concept of "storing food" has also been lost.
Not to be flippant, but it sounds like grandma is using this as a convenient excuse to get out of baking. Or the learned-helplessness has reached epic proportions...
As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.
Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.
I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.
I was on a liquid diet for a much shorter amount of time and my dad noted that he could blend chili. I still like chili and would probably default to that if I had to go back onto a liquid diet.
My mom always used Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup as gravy to put on white rice when I was a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a soup. Mentally, there is now way I could eat it that way. It'd feel like I was just eating gravy.
If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
You put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.
That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.
The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.
Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.
And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.
A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.
"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.
If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.
This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).
Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)
That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.
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 your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside?
Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.
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 consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)
> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?
Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.
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 recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.
And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.
Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.
If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.
Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?
I'm saying its not trivial to replace a box mix in a recipe with from scratch ingredients. And no, frozen dinners don't have very good flavor or texture compared to the food it emulates. Boxed cakes are superior than from-scratch cakes by many metrics. But yes, I agree that people should definitely make their own and try to get better. It's just not a trivial replacement in a recipe. Box mixes in certain granny subcultures are a staple ingredient, almost on the tier of flour. If my meatloaf glaze recipe calls for ketchup, I'll just use Heinz or whatever, and not make it from scratch, unless it was really important to me.
> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.
I’d assume most? I got one in university shortly after I moved out, and since combining kitchens with my wife and getting a more precise scale for coffee, now have several more than I actually need.
I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.
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 treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...
So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.
The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.
Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
I am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
Though people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.
My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.
The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
Two main mistakes that people make:
1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in.
2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
Some pack, some sift and scoop. You have to know what the recipe wants. Weigh is in my opinion superior, it just wasn’t widely accessible before cheap digital scales.
four is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.
Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.
As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
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.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
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.
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.
Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.
NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
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.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
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 "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.
You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.
A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.
My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.
But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.
SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.
i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.
That may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
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 crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
She's upset that the recipes are different
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice.
You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes:
"The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber
https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge
The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode:
https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45
That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.
I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.
Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
I have a professional cookbook like this
Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. 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.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
> 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.
After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
Yes, except for this part:
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/
Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.
A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.
I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.
But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.
We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
6 large (US) eggs is between 12oz and 14.5oz.[0] This has been stuck in my head since I first learned European sizes were different.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...
Could the six eggshells weigh half an ounce each? It's easier to weigh eggs whole.
That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.
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 things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.
If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason.
Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
Link for the lazy:
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
Lucille Bluth underestimated, it turns out!
(Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
She was dead on if you account for inflation.
$10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
Nah, that's inflation.
Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts.
Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?
I tried my best to update several of my family recipes.
A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”.
This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
[dead]
> She's upset that the recipes are different, but [...]
That is such an entitled nerd attitude. "Someone else is inconvenienced by my obvious improvements, but clearly they are wrong."
Imagine if someone came by and "standardized" all your build scripting to use the same command line parser and all your CI recipes blew up. Yeah, it's like that. People have jobs to do, even if you don't think those jobs are important. And they've spent years (or likely decades in this particular case) doing their own process improvements and optimization work.
Stay in your lane, basically.
The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update.
To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.
"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
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 chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
> 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 flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
>> 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 old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.
I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...
But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe. I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.
Be snobby about cake ingredients.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Leaky gut is a myth. It's used to scare people and sell things. If you don't believe me, feel free to read it's Wikipedia page.
Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch.
Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
Just the other day I was making brownies and I always make them from scratch, but my partner has been making a particular box mix forever and thought I'd buy one and try it since its easier than from scratch.
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
> Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients. There's nothing wrong with using processed food in a recipe
Is this a troll? I thought it was pretty well understood that processed food is linked with eating and nutritional issues. I have personally found a strong correlation between food quality and the lack of gums, modified starches, and other artificial ingredients.
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe?
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
My child baked a cake from scratch and it tasted better than a box of cake mix. It took much more time, but it was healthier and tastier than cake from mix. We still use brownie mix though, with adaptations, for making brownies and chocolate cookies.
Oh, that’s just not true. Buy a cookbook or two. It’s not hard to bake a decent cake from ingredients unless you’re grossly incompetent in the kitchen.
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
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 processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
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 think to myself, "heh, this has boxed mix in it, she doesn't know what TRUE cake is".
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
They produce different textures and tastes.
If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.
But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.
Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
> 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.
That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? Something tells me this is about that bias people have, the one where long chemical names are all bad, because they're chemicals, and the only good chemicals one may use is ones that are common enough to receive a non-intimidating normal name. It's all chemistry all the way down.
If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor.
Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.
Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
Nothing in this comment suggests anything bad about them, just that you can do it a different way.
If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason.
> 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?
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 siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.
I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
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 here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
“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.
When recipes that we use called for a box of something. You seem argumentative about this, but it's easy to understand.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
Because we use those ingredients constantly and regularly.
You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months.
It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
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 different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour.
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.
Eh? We eat almost no flour on a daily basis. We might eat cake every few months.
"Standard" is not standard at all.
If you only bake cakes I guess it makes sense — but you can make many other baked goods with flour.
Yeah, "Standard" will vary a lot from one place to another.
For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on.
All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good.
So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry.
And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
I think you and I have very different ideas of "helpless". :)
"Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me.
First World Problems I guess...
I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions.
I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.
It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.
When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?
It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
It's time to log off lil bro
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.
So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
This is a link to the last time I talked about this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745
and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539
EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:
The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/
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 measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
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.
Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
Spam is a hell of a lot harder to make than cake mix. Cake mix is literally just measuring, and what was in the box when your mom made it isn't from the same suppliers, or probably of the same quality, as what's in the box now.
But these bakers don't want "cake mix", they want the specific Betty Crocker cake mix
And then can still get it. But noooo "opening 2 boxes" is a hurdle too far...
Apparently the concept of "storing food" has also been lost.
Not to be flippant, but it sounds like grandma is using this as a convenient excuse to get out of baking. Or the learned-helplessness has reached epic proportions...
What's in the box is unknown to most people. Unknowable, even. They are surprisingly complex mixes.
As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.
Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.
I was actually quite fond of it as a soup when I was young --- then I broke my jaw on the first day of summer vacation when I was 14 and after 6 weeks of living on various liquid foods, haven't had it since.
I was on a liquid diet for a much shorter amount of time and my dad noted that he could blend chili. I still like chili and would probably default to that if I had to go back onto a liquid diet.
My mom always used Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup as gravy to put on white rice when I was a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a soup. Mentally, there is now way I could eat it that way. It'd feel like I was just eating gravy.
Yes, I’ve eaten it as soup for decades. It’s great with some pasta mixed through it too.
I stand corrected !
That was my sister’s favorite soup as a kid. I ended up having it a lot as a result as well.
If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.
Oh no they don't.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject.
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
The confidence. Why wouldn't they? The nobility inherent in suffering more labor to make a worse final product?
You put in barely more labor to get a better final product, because cakes (and brownies, etc) made from boxed mixes never turn out as well as those from scratch.
That's just not really true though. There are other ingredients in box mixes, such as conditioners and other incremental improvements grandma doesn't have a container of on her counter. You certainly have more control over the final product if you mix everything from scratch, but these mixes are popular for a reason; they make good cake without having to reinvent decades of kitchen science and allow bakers to focus on stuff that matters instead of dick-measuring about who can sift and measure flour the best.
The amount of people in the cooking enthusiast world that dismiss chemistry and assume it makes the end product worse is just a socially acceptable form of ludditeism. Meanwhile in the professional world Sysco does 80 billion dollars of business.
Yeah, there's a pervasive and strange focus on purity in cooking, for whatever definition satisfies that term. All food is the result of a sequence of chemical and physical reactions; understanding those reactions might take away some of the magic but also allows you to systemically and precisely hone the outcome. I think some people resent that the magic can be explained and improved.
And it's not as if boxed cake mix is better or that the properties of commercial cake mix can't be known and used in your own from scratch baking but it's so frustrating when people are just like, "just make recipe without all the chemistry and it will be better" as if any deviation from what they consider natural is automatically worse or that those "weird" ingredients are in there for no reason other than to give you cancer or something.
A fun example from history is that currants used to be used for making all flavors of jams because they're high in pectin and would look at modern chefs funny for using this unnatural white chemical.
Is Sysco a name that you associate with good food? In my mind they mostly supply chain restaurants and prisons.
"Good" and "high quality" for however you define them are different goals. Sysco does a fantastic job of meeting the need for "good enough food at ridiculous scale". Does Sysco meet the need of like, Michelin quality food at ridiculous scale? No, but if it were possible, they'd probably be the ones doing it.
Yeah, no. I definitely noticed when the kitchen manager was fired and they started serving reheated Sysco food instead. It’s not good at all.
Oh yes they do: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec
(Also linked above)
What’s the difference between making the mix yourself, or just buying the exact same ingredients already mixed at the correct ratio?
If you mix it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.
This means you can vary/substitute ingredients such as heart salt for regular salt if you're on a DASH diet (half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride).
Do you know if that will even work? Baking is not cooking -- you can't just swap ingredients and get a similar result.
When a baker makes the cake from scratch I’m alway disappointed. Boxes mixes taste better. They can’t beat the emulsifiers in those box mixes.
Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.
I think people know you can purchase baking ingredients.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)
That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.
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 your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside? Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.
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 consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)
> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?
Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.
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 recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.
And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.
Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.
Baking may not be easy but it’s not that hard.
If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.
Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?
I'm saying its not trivial to replace a box mix in a recipe with from scratch ingredients. And no, frozen dinners don't have very good flavor or texture compared to the food it emulates. Boxed cakes are superior than from-scratch cakes by many metrics. But yes, I agree that people should definitely make their own and try to get better. It's just not a trivial replacement in a recipe. Box mixes in certain granny subcultures are a staple ingredient, almost on the tier of flour. If my meatloaf glaze recipe calls for ketchup, I'll just use Heinz or whatever, and not make it from scratch, unless it was really important to me.
If they’re only going to need dinner once a month? Hell yes.
Depending where you are, low (and high) protein flour can be hard to find at the supermarket.
https://satwcomic.com/family-time
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.
Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
> 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?
While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.
I’d assume most? I got one in university shortly after I moved out, and since combining kitchens with my wife and getting a more precise scale for coffee, now have several more than I actually need.
I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.
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 treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...
So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.
The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
You can just buy small eggs, and use them for fractional eggs.
Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.
This is a useful thing to know when writing instructions on how to bake 1000 Betty Crocker cakes
Also you totally can reduce an egg by 30%, it's just a pain in the ass.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
Why separate, split, and then combine? Why not combine and then split?
I am guessing: unless you blast them in a blender, the beaten mix isn't really uniform and you may end up extracting more egg white or more yolk than intended when you remove some of this lumpy content.
^ yea pretty much this
I'm not 100% sure but whenever I've tried to reduce an egg without splitting first, it always ends up with a super wrong amount of yolk
I could also just be bad at it, idk
In many recipes you must whip the whites, and they must be completely yolk free.
Grocery stores sell different sizes of eggs over here.
Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead
I always doubled "an egg and a white" as "two eggs and two whites". Whites and yolks are very different and make the end result very different.
Sure you can. Scramble them a bit and weigh them.
I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.
Volume-based measurements, too. One person's "half a cup" is not another's.
I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
Baking in general is very sensitive. I've made batches of cookies that I've tried to reproduce for years but, because I didn't take notes, could not. Hell even the altitude you bake at requires significant adjustment.
Though people have been baking in poor conditions for a long time. If peasants could bake bread without even a cast iron dutch oven maybe you can. Sure each batch is different but it works.
Cooking is art. Baking is science.
They are both art and both science.
My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.
The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...
I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.
Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.
I mean, also, when was the last time you had your oven properly calibrated? How sure are you that it's actually 350 F?
IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.
The flour should not be packed? I've always done it like that, it seemed so obvious that that would give a less random result that having it loose. I guess I'll weigh it and check against the markings on my measuring cup next time.
Brown sugar should be packed; flour must not be — you’ll get substantially more mass per volume than the recipes assume.
Some pack, some sift and scoop. You have to know what the recipe wants. Weigh is in my opinion superior, it just wasn’t widely accessible before cheap digital scales.
In my four decades of baking, I have never seen a recipe that calls for packing flour. It is always sifted, spooned and leveled, or weighed.
four is alway sifted - to get the mouse droppings out. In our modern world nobody has mouse droppings in flour but tradition is still strong. Weighing doesn't care but if you are scouping as much air as possible is what the recipe assumes.
Weighing is the only weigh.
Or measure flour by weight instead of volume.
Flour should be weighed.
Well I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.
Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.
As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.
But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?
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.
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.
Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.
We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.
At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.
Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.
Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.
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.
Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)
I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.
Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.
NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.
It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.
In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.
That makes sense since it's an American dessert. Germany seemingly only produces the worst possible version of American bread and butter popcorn.
> None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging
I mean, they were probably all made using convenient measurements that were converted to whatever units you use after the fact.
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.
Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.
The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.
For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.
A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
Original source: https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-m...
Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.
https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
Shiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.
If the box mix stops working then people will stop buying it and throw the recipes away, leading to a lasting reduction sales.
But… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.
I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.
This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.
Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.
Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.
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Please don't use HN for ideological battle. This is clearly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.
Sales of betty crocker mix can go down.
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
vanilla and sugar has also shrinkflated
Vanilla and sugar are both relatively fungible commodities. If one brand shrinks, buy another one.
While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.
Um. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies.
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
Shrinkflation breaks userspace
Yeah but did you see the yacht it bought?
I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.
Clif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
Shrinkflation and private equity really do ruin everything!
Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be:
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.
The factory must grow.
Ostensibly not since she didn’t bother changing the recipe when the box shrank to ~15oz.
bit rot, but with recipes
reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week
So....just rot then?
I hope Duncan Hines is reading this.
Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.
A Sauceror? You can also make your own spaghetti and become a Pastamancer...
If you make everything from scratch you'll save so much money that you'll make out like a Disco Bandit?
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)
Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.
Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.
Not always. Canned tuna is my favorite. They shrunk the 6oz can to 5 over a decade or so. At one point I laughed at a 5 3/16 oz can.
Huh?
Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.
Speaking of cookie recipes, have you tried the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe?
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Is every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?
Which recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.
The one from email spam circa 2003?
Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.
That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
What a Betty Crocker of Enshitification.
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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 "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...
According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)
So, cake flour?
From what I remember it’s more about the industrial emulsifiers. They give a more sponge-like cake they people tend to enjoy.
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
Because you live in a small apartment and don't have storage space for a thing of flour, a thing of sugar, cocoa you might use twice a year?
Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Because you value convenience?
Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.
> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.
Everything is a raw ingredient.
With that attitude, you might as well just buy a finished cake from the store!
You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.
A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.
I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.
My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.
But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.
SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.
i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.
The people relying on cake mid probably don’t have any of that in their pantry.
>“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.
The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.
A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.
For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.
That may have been true at one time, or it might depend on location. But at least in my area, cake flour is super common. Every grocery store has it. It's not generally worth the hassle of stocking it in my pantry versus just using AP, but when I'm trying to go all out I can get cake flour no problem.
Cake flour, any full-line supermarket will have it.
As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.
Why?
When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are.
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.
Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.
Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.
Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.
No, that’s incorrect. Krusteaz Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix (which, at least where I live, ten miles from Krusteaz HQ, is the only “Krusteaz” anyone cares about) contains flour, sugar, dextrose, baking powder, salt, starch, soybean oil, and buttermilk. Unless I’m using enough of it to justify buying an entire canister of powdered buttermilk - which, by the way, is not cheap, and probably throws that $1/kg calculation off - I can’t mix it up in a shelf-stable way. And if I am using that much of it, I can get it in bulk for ~$2/kg.
Even if your math had been accurate, it’s breathtakingly condescending. If you live in a modern society, and you want to buy pancake mix (pancake mix! of all the inoffensive products!) you should get to buy the damn pancake mix.
In that case it's plausibly a good deal, and of course it would be extremely deplorable to try to take away people's ability to buy pancake mix, or smoke, or drink Coke, or drink Everclear, or snort cocaine. People are almost always better at making the choices that are best for themselves than anyone else would be, because they both know more about themselves and care more.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at it, and explaining how to get better at it is the opposite extreme from being condescending. Condescending is, "Oh, you wouldn't understand," not, "Here's an demonstration of how to work this out for your own situation, which you'll be able to understand," which is what my comment is.
Maybe you think it's condescending because everyone already works out hourly wages for thriftiness-directed activities, but I can assure you that your friends are very unusual if you think that.
Sorry, I still think an off-the-cuff “buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke [unless you’re rich]” is condescending, especially when coming from someone who presumably is not a domain expert, and has not in fact done the relevant math. If it turns out you work for the USDA developing the Thrifty Food Plan, or something similar, I’ll retract my comment.
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
I made some bets, metaphorically speaking, that didn't pay off, or took a long time to pay off. I'm not sure they were bad bets, given what I knew at the time, and it's been very educational at least—especially about the central question of why so many people in modern societies live in such scarcity. To an enormous extent it's structural issues, which I think you could sort of sum up as insufficiently capitalist societies.
Hopefully I'll be in much better shape materially soon! I've just overcome some big external obstacles.
The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.
How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
By the time I’ve soured some milk (to take the place of the buttermilk in the mix) and measured out the oil, I’ve spent five minutes and used a pyrex measuring cup or two that I didn’t otherwise need. That’s apart from getting out the kitchen scale, dragging out the dry ingredient canisters, taking the time to weigh or measure everything… I just don’t get it. Why do I have people telling me I should dirty even one extra dish? Or spend even five extra minutes? All so I can, what? Be proud of my homemaking skills? I’d rather be coding a side project, thanks. Your mom is more than welcome to make her pancakes from scratch. I’m glad she enjoys it. Personally I prefer Krusteaz. I do not understand why I am getting pushback on this.
I'm not pushing back at all, especially since I made two pancakes from Krusteaz this morning. What I like about Krusteaz is scaling down to 2 small pancakes without thinking about the proportions.
But when I'm on the ball, pancakes from scratch are really not much more trouble. My trick is that precise measurements don't matter. I eyeball all of the measurements into a big measuring cup, and it works just fine. From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway. How would humanity have spread to all corners of the world, if they had to weigh the ingredients for their pancakes?
Yogurt instead of buttermilk.
> From what I've read, precisely measured ingredients are a modern invention anyway.
I believe this is where the cup measurement came from. Baking is all about ratios, so you could take any (drinking) cup you happen to have and use it to measure your various ingredients, as the ratios will all work out by using the same cup.
I recently saw a very expensive chef’s spoon that was supposed to be a perfect teaspoon(?) and had various other features. It was sold out. Out of curiosity, I went into my drawer, pulled out my normal spoons I eat with and compared them to what my measuring spoons held. It was the same. I just use my normal spoons to measure now. Good enough. I can then use the spoon to eat with, depending on what it is.
That is a good point - scaling down to pancakes for one is a great use case for mixes.
As it happens, my preference for Krusteaz is not all convenience; they’re also what I grew up eating, and they’re still my favorite. I bake a lot from scratch, mostly cookies and bread with the occasional cake, and pancakes are the one thing I never make from scratch because I’m tired of trying everyone’s mom’s amazing recipe and finding it meh. (I’ll gladly spend a weekend morning making these amazing waffles, though: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/light-and-crispy-waffles)
I agree precise measurements don’t matter at all if you’re not too particular about how the finished product comes out. If you have strong preferences about how your baked goods taste, or you want to be able to communicate a recipe to someone else in a reproducible way, that’s when precise measurements start mattering. Kitchen scales were commonplace in England by the Victorian era, so it depends on your definition of “modern.”
Because most people probably have all of those ingredients in their pantry anyways?
I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.
You can actually buy stuff like that if you really want to keep a mix on hand.
The King Arthur powders are great:
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m...
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow...
And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter:
https://hoosierhillfarm.com/shop-products/butter-powder/
The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.