Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
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I can’t speak to that book specifically and am not sure what the translation of Australian moneys to Freedom Units is, but 40 bucks for THIS sounds kinda… I wouldn’t go so far as to say “scammy” but I would definitely imply it.
Yes, baking and the like is almost entirely ratios. But you still have to understand how many parts fat and liquid butter is versus shortening versus lard versus… Yes, understanding those ratios makes it much easier to be flexible and you start realizing just how similar so many recipes are (and what the actual contribution of a given developer is). But that is more in the sense that you learn how similar two bread recipes actaully are as you make both.
The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it. Kenji is going through some stuff lately but his older videos are spectacular for “Two parts flour to one part water but also this is the texture you actually want because humidity is a thing”. But Brian Lagerstrom (and Ethan Chlebowski when he is focusing more on cooking and less on weird wellness guru’ing) have more than taken up the burden. And while it is a few tiers lower, Made With Lau is actually amazing for learning how to translate “older” recipes into actionable steps.
And if you JUST want the ratios? Just go to the library and grab a few of the foundational cookbooks for a given cuisine and look at the recipes. THOSE are the ratios and… they are generally going to be REALLY close
I don’t know if it’s scammy - hard to tell without reading it - but it does sound really incomplete. There are so many variations on fats, liquids, liquids that are fats like oils, different behaviors of fats, the role of proteins like eggs, leavening agents… Maybe the book covers more, but just basic ratios doesn’t seem very helpful.
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The buckwheat panake is specifically a Breton galette. Compare with the galette des rois which does use puff pastry. But you’re too high on your own “America bad” farts to consider that words are used in more than one way.
Then why do you call it just galette instead of galette des rois?
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Then why do you call it just galette instead of galette des rois?
Why did you call it just a galette instead of galette bretonne?
(Because I can use context to figure out which definition is being used instead of jumping straight to gatekeeping)
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I have five pressure canners/coolers. None electric. I don’t trust electronic devices designed to turn electricity into heat and be sold as cheap as possible to be a buy it for life item.
zojirushi Would probably be the only buy it for life rice cooker brand
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I’m all for using box mixes like this to make something easier if you wanna bake shit… but this seems a bit odd…
“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. 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.”
It was a box mix… does that really need passing down? It looks like she sub’d oil for butter and thats it. I’m sure the box suggests a little less butter now… so like, a little less oil? I can’t imagine the box mix cookies are just plain trash now either, unless they just are.
Sound like peak 50/60 style cooking
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Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.
The 80s? Ma’am you have the wrong decade.
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It’s American by nature.
“It’s 1950 and a can is a can is a can, everyone knows how big a can is. And it will never change!”
No.
You need to think in a Truman-Eisenhower can, a Reagan can, a Bush can and an Obama can just as you do about dollars for pretty much every year on record.
Now, I wonder: How many 1979 dollars in a 1990 box of Kellogs?
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I’m all for using box mixes like this to make something easier if you wanna bake shit… but this seems a bit odd…
“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. 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.”
It was a box mix… does that really need passing down? It looks like she sub’d oil for butter and thats it. I’m sure the box suggests a little less butter now… so like, a little less oil? I can’t imagine the box mix cookies are just plain trash now either, unless they just are.
Sometimes it’s easy to be sentimental and nostalgic over trash food. It’s why I love Taco Bell. Especially right now because the 7 Layer and chili Cheese burritos are both back temporarily.
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I’m all for using box mixes like this to make something easier if you wanna bake shit… but this seems a bit odd…
“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. 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.”
It was a box mix… does that really need passing down? It looks like she sub’d oil for butter and thats it. I’m sure the box suggests a little less butter now… so like, a little less oil? I can’t imagine the box mix cookies are just plain trash now either, unless they just are.
They use the box as a base ingredient.
I doubt the recipe is “Use the box as instructed”
All judith needs to do is mix up her own cake mix.
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They use the box as a base ingredient.
I doubt the recipe is “Use the box as instructed”
All judith needs to do is mix up her own cake mix.
When you look at some of the cookie mixes today from them, its use the box, 1/3 cup of butter (or whatever it is, already forgotten the exact amount), and 2 eggs.
Their family recipe in the article was use the box, 2 eggs and a 1/3 cup of oil.
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The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it.
My favorite ice cream cookbook has like six recipes across 150 pages. It explains why those recipes work the way they do (milkfat percentages and cooking temperatures) and then it’s just variations on the recipes in different flavors. I’ve broken like seven ice cream machines getting it right and it’s been worth it.
25 Pages per recipe
That’s a lot of ingredients. How much does it cost to make a quart?
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I’m all for using box mixes like this to make something easier if you wanna bake shit… but this seems a bit odd…
“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. 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.”
It was a box mix… does that really need passing down? It looks like she sub’d oil for butter and thats it. I’m sure the box suggests a little less butter now… so like, a little less oil? I can’t imagine the box mix cookies are just plain trash now either, unless they just are.
There are a lot of recipes out there that use boxed cake mixes off-label. Like I saw Dylan Hollis make something that involved one can of pumpkin puree and one box of spice cake mix. There are a lot of things like that which are going to break if package sizes change.
They may not be authentic homemade gourmet organic quarter sawn BPA free low sulfur fair trade influencer grade but there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for recipes like that because it’s what mama made in the 80’s, and we used to sit around that godawful yellow table with that one chair that had a gash in the back, you remember that? And she’d put that icing on it, that cream cheese icing.
The image I hate most is someone trying to do the old thing of one box of this, one can of that, the batter’s not how they remember but whatever, bake…doesn’t come out right, over bake…what’s going on? And now we’re wasting food because “a box of cake mix” isn’t what it used to be. All because we suffer a few billionaires to live.
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During the previous round of shirkflation I warned people about knowing what year a recipe was from because “a can” means something different in 2004 than in 2010. And now it means something different again in 2025.
Now boxes are getting the shrink treatment too.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/618032
Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.
If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.
So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.
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Guess everyone learns this at some point. I just skip any recipe that doesn’t give me volume or weight for everything. Otherwise, the chance of messing up the recipe is too high.
That doesn’t really help when you need X amount of something and everything is sold in Y amounts.
While some ingredients this isn’t an issue, I’ve run into this for pasta sauce/paste, coconut milk, canned beans, etc. which are hard to work around.
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There are a lot of recipes out there that use boxed cake mixes off-label. Like I saw Dylan Hollis make something that involved one can of pumpkin puree and one box of spice cake mix. There are a lot of things like that which are going to break if package sizes change.
They may not be authentic homemade gourmet organic quarter sawn BPA free low sulfur fair trade influencer grade but there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for recipes like that because it’s what mama made in the 80’s, and we used to sit around that godawful yellow table with that one chair that had a gash in the back, you remember that? And she’d put that icing on it, that cream cheese icing.
The image I hate most is someone trying to do the old thing of one box of this, one can of that, the batter’s not how they remember but whatever, bake…doesn’t come out right, over bake…what’s going on? And now we’re wasting food because “a box of cake mix” isn’t what it used to be. All because we suffer a few billionaires to live.
My point is, all she did was change butter for oil. She didn’t do anything special or fancy like your suggesting.
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That doesn’t really help when you need X amount of something and everything is sold in Y amounts.
While some ingredients this isn’t an issue, I’ve run into this for pasta sauce/paste, coconut milk, canned beans, etc. which are hard to work around.
I work around it fairly often. It can be inconvenient for sure. I think I end up avoiding those types of recipes if I’m not going to be cooking with those ingredients often enough. But for ones that I do, coconut curries funnily enough, I just deal with having some in my fridge at pretty much all times.
Other times I substitute the canned/frozen version for fresh since you can buy the right amount.
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What happened to grandmothers cooking and baking from normal ingredients, using handwritten recipes collected on papers randomly stuck into an old cook book?
Well…
World War 1 happened. there was rationing.
Then the 20’s happened and grandmothers disappear from the historical record, they either became flappers or were shot to death with a Thompson submachine gun in a speakeasy. RIP roaring 20’s grandmas.
Then the Great Depression happened and the only foodstuffs that existed were peanut butter and saltine crackers.
Then World War 2 happened, there was rationing again.
Rationing ended in 1947, and basically everything in America changes. GI’s returning from war 1. fuck the fucking fuck out of the women, resulting in more pregnancies than Earth had ever seen before. There’s a housing boom, they skin the continent of old growth pine to build suburbs, with adjacent business districts full of supermarkets complete with large parking lots for the family car. These supermarkets are full of mass manufactured packaged food, some of which use technologies developed for military rations. We enter the era of the boxed cake mix, the canned cake icing, and the frozen TV dinner. All of this is new and exciting, and the marketing poses industrial made foods such as shortening as more scientific and purified than natural food.
I got this from a comment under a Youtube video, responding to why Jello was so popular in the 1960’s: Because a gelatin mold was seen as an impressive feat of housewifery. Much earlier than 1960 and gelatin is a pain in the ass to make but now that it’s a commercial product that comes in a box, you pour the packet into some hot water and stir and bam, it became quite a trend. The same happened with cake. Pour a box of powder in a bowl, dump in 2 cups of water, stir it a little and then pour into pans and bake. Betty Crocker had to take the egg powder back out of the mix because market research showed housewives felt underwhelmed, baking with all-in-one mix didn’t feel like enough of a project. So make them provide their own eggs I guess.
So the Greatest Generation, my grandparents, bake like that. Because all the hip keen 25 year olds are baking like this, MOM, I can make a whole cake in an hour, I’m icing while you’re still sifting that flour. That’s how they teach their boomer daughters how to bake, and the average boomer housewife is at a loss as to how to bake a cake without a box of Betty Crocker.
Gen X has never and will never exist.
Millennial women seem have a complicated relationship to baking. On the one hand, there’s an entire genre of television/Youtube about baking cakes aimed pretty much at millennial women. Find me a woman in her 30’s that doesn’t have a strongly formed opinion on fondant. That’s what they watch when they’re temporarily sick of True Crime. On the other hand, feminism’s distaste for women in the kitchen has lead to a lot of women having no discernible cooking skills. I’m a better cook than most of the women I’ve dated, and most of the women I’ve dated I wouldn’t trust to own a sifter or a rolling pin, particularly the city dwelling Democrat voters.
Gen Z? Like they’re ever going to live somewhere with an oven.
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Yeah but a can is basically one unit. Once a can is opened it usually has to be used relatively quickly, so I would much rather use an entire can than measure out a fractional number of cans to be precise with measurements. It depends on the ingredient of course but eg with beans it really doesn’t matter to get the exact weight.
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Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.
If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.
So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.
If it says a couple spoonfuls then you are golden to abandon all fear and just go with it. That’s half my curry recipes. How much curry do you want? How much can you handle?
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Which is why a lot of recipes will say “One 14 oz can of…”
