Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
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It’s brain dead easy cooking and people that do it were probably taught by their parents to.
Restaurants do it all the time. Imagine the cake you really like at that one place. Now imagine that it’s literally just Betty Crocker.
I learned this first hand at my very first job at 16 and I’ve never looked at fast food the same way since. The fast food in question is a well-known regional chain, as large McDonald’s. Places like McDonald’s have their own dedicated supply chain.
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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
There are thousands of recipes sites on the internet with dead simple recipes, especially for cookies. Baking from scratch has never been easier to do.
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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.
American here. I always sucked at baking until I discovered a UK site using the metric master race measurements.
It was all in grams instead of tablespoons/ounces/cups.
Suddenly my shit was perfect…
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Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?
It’s just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.
The reason for having to add an egg, milk, or some other simple ingredient is because the mix companies found out people were more willing to adopt these mixes if there was a step where they had to do something beyond just adding water. Or at least this is what they told me on the Jiffy Mix factory tour as a child.
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It would be better if other recipes adjusted accordingly.
The Zatarans Jambalaya box still says to add a pound of smoked sausage. But those sausages went down to 14oz. Then 12oz. Now some are 10oz. The box still says to add a pound. It’s becoming a hotdog/bun situation.
I haven’t made Zatarans Jambalaya in years but I remember having this exact problem. I would have to use like 1 1/3 packages of sausage and end up with 2/3 of a sausage leftover
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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.
You are confusing baking with cooking.
Baking is much closer to a science than cooking. It is all about precise measurements, and you have to be a very good baker to “wing it” and end up with a consistently good end product.
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American here. I always sucked at baking until I discovered a UK site using the metric master race measurements.
It was all in grams instead of tablespoons/ounces/cups.
Suddenly my shit was perfect…
baking by volume is INSANE why would anyone do that?!
i remember as a kid my nan telling me to not pack the flour too tightly in the cups or the measurement will be off. like why not just weigh the flour?!
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baking by volume is INSANE why would anyone do that?!
i remember as a kid my nan telling me to not pack the flour too tightly in the cups or the measurement will be off. like why not just weigh the flour?!
I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.
8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.
I bought a food scale and gram everything now.
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Where do galette (buck wheat savory pancakes from Britanny) and puff pastry come together? Or is that just another Amerikan kitchen misnomer like “pepperoni” or “bologna”?
The website joyofbaking.com defines the term galette as “a French term signifying a flat round cake that can be either sweet or savory and while [recipes can use] puff pastry as a base, they can also be made from risen doughs like brioche, or with a sweet pastry crust.”
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Same only with Pasteis De Nata:
Pastéis de nata from the Big Green Egg
Craving pastéis de nata? No need to buy them when you can bake this sweet Portuguese delicacy yourself using this recipe on your Big Green Egg.
Big Green Egg (www.biggreenegg.eu)
My problem: There are different puff pastries out there and so I made the recipe THREE TIMES to figure out the best one to use.
Spoiler - The most expensive one.
Dufour.
PUFF PASTRY DOUGH - Dufour Pastry Kitchens
Dufour's puff pastry is the epitome of fine dough—crisp, buttery, and flaky, perfect for both savory and sweet creations.
Dufour Pastry Kitchens (dufourpastrykitchens.com)
Here’s the difference:
“first enclosing a “butter block” in the dough”
Compared with:
Frozen Sheets Pastry Dough - Pepperidge Farm
When you start with Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry, you can create extraordinary dishes, both savory and sweet. Let your imagination take you to delicious places! Each Puff Pastry sheet is made up of many delicate layers, each one essential to creating its supremely light, airy texture. Sheets are ready to be shaped, filled and baked. […]
Pepperidge Farm (www.pepperidgefarm.com)
“VEGETABLE OILS (PALM, SOYBEAN, HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED)”
Store brand is the same.
None of them were AWFUL, just the Dufour is head and shoulders above the others, and 4x the price.
Hah! I used Dufour also. My choices were that and Pepperidge Farm but I knew the critical part was it had to use real butter. Looking at the prices I knew that PF being half the price meant that they had to make some serious compromises. If I’m going to eat a bunch of calories I’m going to do it right.
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The reason for having to add an egg, milk, or some other simple ingredient is because the mix companies found out people were more willing to adopt these mixes if there was a step where they had to do something beyond just adding water. Or at least this is what they told me on the Jiffy Mix factory tour as a child.
They didn’t do a study or anything. There was a prevailing theory at the time those mixes were first created that women have an inherent desire to do cooking stuff and since they figured women would be the main ones shopping for food items, they had to add more cooking actions to trick them into buying their products.
Frozen dinners have similar ploys by adding unnecessary stirring steps to the microwave directions.
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I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.
8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.
I bought a food scale and gram everything now.
Most recipes will use the volume measurement since everyone has measuring cups and almost no one has a food scale. Flour is close enough to a fluid anyway.
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Oh, man, “bottle of Coca-Cola”. When I was a kid, that meant a 16 ounce glass bottle, but prior to that it could have been 8 ounces, 10 ounces. Now it could be 1, 2, or even 3 liters.
Do they still sell 3 liters? I haven’t seen one in ages.
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I often have issues explaining to literally everyone that oz and fl oz are not the same… Only true match is water which is what it was created for.
8oz is weight.
8 fl oz is volume…So a cup of flour is a volume measurement of something that should be measured by weight.
I bought a food scale and gram everything now.
I have two scales in the kitchen. One regular digital food scale I use all the time. One that’s better suited for measuring cocaine that I bought when I was needing a lot more precision to brew one gallon batches of beer.
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The problem with that is that the size of the pot changes the volume of water with a linear finger measure.
Like for extremes if you had a test tube shaped pot with a foot of rice deep and only a finger depth of water is way different than a giant wide pot where grains area single layer and then a finger depth over top.
That’s why you use a rice cooker.
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Do they still sell 3 liters? I haven’t seen one in ages.
I see them mostly at import shops.
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Yeah but it kinda messes up fried rice
You don’t use that part for the fried rice. You just eat it.
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Who the fuck is buying those boxes if they still need things like eggs adding?
It’s just pre-measured flour, baking soda and sugar. You can do that in under a minute. Shit, the stuff is in the same aisle.
Betty Crocker does shrinkflation and you go after the consumer. Way to blame the victim there.
Do you have, in your cupboards, the ingredients to make a German chocolate cake, a pecan cake, and a carrot cake? No? Why not? Swap any of of those for a spice cake, or angel food, or gingerbread… You can’t??? Why not? A trip to the store and have exactly what I need to make any or all of those. I don’t have to pay for extra ingredients that are just going to sit, take up space, and go bad. Do you know how much it would cost to buy all the unique ingredients to make any of those cakes? And you used to get a reliable result too for look, taste, quantity, and quality. But with shrinkflation, that’s gone out the door.
Also, ignoring the fact, so many recipes start with a box from Betty Crocker, and then using something they do regularly have at home and use, they add their own little twist on it. Or just use one of those boxes as a base because not everyone has that stuff sitting around or even has the space to store it.
Lastly, flour is one of the most dangerous ingredients to have just sit around in terms of food safety.
But yeah, shame the customer…
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The website joyofbaking.com defines the term galette as “a French term signifying a flat round cake that can be either sweet or savory and while [recipes can use] puff pastry as a base, they can also be made from risen doughs like brioche, or with a sweet pastry crust.”
If you order a Galette in France, you definitely get the savory version.
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You don’t use that part for the fried rice. You just eat it.
But then I don’t have all the rice I should for fried rice
