Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
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I made soft sourdough pretzels this week with just baking soda and brown sugar and they turned out great!
Cool! Not traditional, but it’s an alaklai so I’m sure it’s a more practical way than hunting down lye at the grocery store.
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You must do some high stakes cooking. I always tweak recipes, sometimes even if I’ve never made it before.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, sometimes it does. There are probably some recipes I’d give a go. But really, it doesn’t actually come up all that often. I think a lot of people have converted cans in old recipes to actual measurements before posting online.
My family doesn’t really have any recipes they passed down. Pretty sure they did everything by feel.
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I was making a galette for the first time and while I was going over the epic saga that is making your own puff pastry I said, “fuck it, I’ll just buy some from the freezer section at the store”. It came out great and I saved 3 hours of my life.
Phyllo dough and puff pastry are things I will totally cheat on. And if I’m turning leftovers and my frequent surplus of eggs into quiche I will cheat with a frozen pie crust. Even Alton Brown says that last one is allowed.
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Before this, I’d been complaining about frozen vegetables for a while now. I have several soup/casserole/savory-pie type recpies that all call for frozen vegetables by the pound (ex: Defrost 1lb. broccoli and 1lb. cauliflower). Now all the veg comes in 12oz bags instead of 16oz, and I don’t want to make 3/4 the food, I want the WHOLE recipe – and I don’t want a bunch of half-used bags in the freezer.
Messing with cake mixes is an even bigger problem for me. On the rare occasion I make a cake, it is either homemade carrot cake or from a box because I all my attempts to make a decent regular cake (chocolate, angel food, or whatever) have been too dry, too crumbly or otherwise inferior. I guess Betty Crocker just doesn’t want my money. S’alright. I like my carrot cake and its surely more healthy.
I’d look to see if there is a different veg I could add to fill out the quarter pound. Like maybe some raw carrots could be chopped and added to the cauliflower And if they’re cut to the right size they’ll cook them the same amount of time.
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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
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
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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
I didn’t learn to measure anything until I was 30. I just cooked by vibes. My girlfriend started getting really irritated that I would make something and she would never have it again. Something like it? Sure. But it? No. So I started actually learning how to cook and know how much was going in .
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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
The heating time time on some frozen chicken strips was for “a cup”. Of long frozen pieces of chicken.
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I’d look to see if there is a different veg I could add to fill out the quarter pound. Like maybe some raw carrots could be chopped and added to the cauliflower And if they’re cut to the right size they’ll cook them the same amount of time.
OR they could go back to standard portions that don’t require recipe fixes. The better solution is to use fresh veg, but frozen is a huge time saver. FWIW, the broc/cauliflower recipe continues and adding more carrots would overwhelm the carrot quantity. This is pretty close to mine, but I don’t use lemon juice and do use nutmeg: https://oukosher.org/recipes/layered-vegetable-kugel-pareve/
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I had a chicken casserole recipe and it called for “a can of cream of chicken soup”. Ok, this soup comes in the normal, single serving size and the jumbo “cooking for a family” size. It made the recipe unusable.
anything that calls for a can of cream of chicken soup was going to end up the same way regardless.
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OR they could go back to standard portions that don’t require recipe fixes. The better solution is to use fresh veg, but frozen is a huge time saver. FWIW, the broc/cauliflower recipe continues and adding more carrots would overwhelm the carrot quantity. This is pretty close to mine, but I don’t use lemon juice and do use nutmeg: https://oukosher.org/recipes/layered-vegetable-kugel-pareve/
But then the product would cost more and people would immediately go to whatever other brand was available out of spite or budget consciousness.
Margarine? I didn’t know people still used that.
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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!”
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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
What happened to grandmothers cooking and baking from normal ingredients, using handwritten recipes collected on papers randomly stuck into an old cook book?
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On the flip side you get goofy things like this where you are supposed to use a specific amount of something that so far as I know you would have to buy as a pre-made mix. Either that or start a separate recipe to make you own cake mix.
White cake mix is easy though:
2¾ cups cake flour
1½ cups granulated sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine salt, sea salt or himalayan
4 tablespoons softened unsalted butterIn a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
Then use a pastry blender to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Blend until the butter is not longer detectable and the mix is a fine crumb.
Store in an airtight container and refrigerate until ready to use.
Alternately, skip the butter step until just before use. No need to refrigerate then.
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I didn’t learn to measure anything until I was 30. I just cooked by vibes. My girlfriend started getting really irritated that I would make something and she would never have it again. Something like it? Sure. But it? No. So I started actually learning how to cook and know how much was going in .
Cooking freehanded can work. Cooking is art. Baking, on the other hand, is science. Every ingredient must be measured precisely, or you’ll get seriously funny results. And often on the bad side of funny.
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The heating time time on some frozen chicken strips was for “a cup”. Of long frozen pieces of chicken.
My favourite is “one cup of spinach”.
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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?
Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.
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I was making a galette for the first time and while I was going over the epic saga that is making your own puff pastry I said, “fuck it, I’ll just buy some from the freezer section at the store”. It came out great and I saved 3 hours of my life.
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”?
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Cake mixes use cake flour which is a super low protein flour great for cakes. Pastry flour likewise is a lower protein percentage wise. Bread flour is like 12%, AP is around 10 or 11% protein by weight. Cake flour is like 8% which is great for cake but limited.
So the boxed cake mixes are pre-mixed with leaveners like baking powder and soda but they are a way to buy not too much cake flour, as well.
How do they distinguish between those flours in the US? Here we have three main grades: 405, 550, and 1070, denoting low to high protein wheat flour.
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“we can’t have pancakes because I didn’t buy any mix” “What? Mix? You know you can just make that stuff on your own. Right?”
We have reached a point where, despite celebrity chefs existing, some people have zero idea that you can make stuff without a can of this, a block of cream cheese, a box of that and a bottle of this. They don’t know the first thing about cooking. To them pretzels are something you buy from someone else and sometimes you have to bake them yourself.
I’ve shared my grandmothers recipe before, worth sharing again. Caution: Makes a metric fuckton of pancakes. Make for multiple people. You cannot eat this many pancakes.
1 Qt. Buttermilk
2 TBS Baking Soda
1 TBS Salt
4 Cups Flour
2 TBS Baking Powder
1 Pkg Dry Yeast
1/4 C. Oil
6 Eggs
1 cup of milk the next morning.Put 1 quart buttermilk in large bowl and add 2 TBS Baking SODA and 1 TBS Salt.
Mix 4 cups of flour with 2 TBS Baking POWDER, stir this mixture into the buttermilk.
Don’t mix up the SODA with the POWDER. You might not think it will make a difference, it does.
Add one package of dry yeast, 1/4 cup oil. Mix.
Whip 6 eggs till foamy, fold in mixture. Do not use electric mixer, use mixer tine by hand.
Pour batter into large pitcher or bowl. Cover with foil. Refrigerate overnight.
The next morning put a cup of milk in the pitcher to thin the batter.
Heat pan until hot. Add 3 TBS or so of oil, when water droplets sizzle in the pan it’s ready.
Cook pancakes in 2s or 3s. When the tops are covered in steam-holes then it’s ready to flip. 2 to 3 minutes or so. Can be as fast as 1 minute. Do not turn your back or they will burn.
Lasts 10 days to 2 weeks in fridge. Yeast will turn black over time, this is normal. Stir batter before use.
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At least if I bought the 20 ounce bag, that’s divisible by 4, and taking out 12, leaves 8… but still…
Baking shouldn’t start with a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.
And if it was an 8 ounce bag you could easily scale the recipe with the ratios since you’re using 1/2 lb chips instead of 3/4 lb. But this 5/8ths shit is just asinine.
