Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
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once we got an electric pressure cooker it got a lot easier, but now i miss my rice pot that’s in a box somewhere in the garage.
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.
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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
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.
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I’d cry if I had to tower of hanoi every time I started up my stand mixer!
That’s pretty much my life every time I need a pot from the cabinet, shifting and stacking.
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Recipes that don’t specify things in grams and millilitres can go screw.
“Now add a traditional american furlong of bushel sauce to the 25 ounce pot until it bubbles up by five and a smidge horse hands” … yeah, no
Uses some American brand name you’ve never heard of as an ingredient with no further elaboration
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That’s an American thing. In most of the world butter comes in ~half pound units. So half a stick would be half a cup. Except Australia which 500 gram blocks. America has been 1/4 pound units since 1800s but didn’t move to the stick shape until the 1950s.
In Germany it’s 250g, which is way off 226.80g if you’re doing something as precise as baking can be.
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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.
i mean, neither did i. someone bought it for us. i feel like such a luddite sometimes. we mostly use it for rice and making budder, which it does a fantastic job at. we’ve had ours for 8 years which i had to look up and shocks me that it’s been working that well that long.
i keep wanting to make hummus, i just never do. it makes the smoothest hummus (we put the beans in for 45 minutes, no pre-soak), but you don’t exactly need it to be electric. you got the pressure canner already.
also the lemon curd is so easy. godsdammit i gotta make lemon curd with my budder i am so lazy
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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 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.
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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.
