Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
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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.
Once you figure out the science you can even freehand baking. Salt, flour, water yeast. Got a flour with more protein? Up the water and decrease the salt a little. Trying to make bread out of cake flour? Decrease the water a touch. Know what your target hydration level is for a bread type and you can pretty much wing the rest. Can’t do a double rise today? Do a slow rise in the fridge overnight. Want a slightly thicker crust? Add more salt. Baking has a lot of potential for freeform once you figure out the mechanics behind what goes into a recipe.
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I stock three different protein levels in my kitchen. Cake flour is used up in my Ukrainian paprika chicken and dumplings recipe. I never make cakes.
I had not heard of that one. Thank you for something to research!
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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.
Usually percentage of the flour that is protein. It is marked on the bag as well as usually marketed as pastry, cake, bread, all purpose, high gluten for like bagels and pretzels, and then it is up to the grind for super fine flour for pizza would want high protein to make the gluten but finely ground.
but either way it is by percentage on the side of the sack.
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Baking powder and yeast. They weren’t taking any chances. Did she work in a kitchen of lumberjacks?
You haven’t met my family.
The hard part is letting the batter sit overnight that first night!
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Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.
Your grandma maybe
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Stuff like that is available to buy at places like bulk barn. You can buy by weight or volume there.
Never heard of the place around here, but I like the thought. Buying things for odd amounts like to top up a spice jar without having a separate large container.
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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.
Yeah, which is the real way to go. Sub-recipies end up screwing up my flows at times, ‘self-rising’ flour is another thing that I don’t keep around premade and have to stop and make separate.
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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.
i can assure you most of the world does not measure butter in pounds, we have 500g blocks here in sweden as well and i’d expect that to be the european standard at least.
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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
Great comment thread here! Just found this book…kind if a game-changer for me…
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My favourite is “one cup of spinach”.
If you cook a cup of spinach you gonna be left a single spinach leaf when it’s done lol. Spinach follows no rules.
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Once you figure out the science you can even freehand baking. Salt, flour, water yeast. Got a flour with more protein? Up the water and decrease the salt a little. Trying to make bread out of cake flour? Decrease the water a touch. Know what your target hydration level is for a bread type and you can pretty much wing the rest. Can’t do a double rise today? Do a slow rise in the fridge overnight. Want a slightly thicker crust? Add more salt. Baking has a lot of potential for freeform once you figure out the mechanics behind what goes into a recipe.
I’ve seen recipes that are based around the water content (I.e. put X ml of water and add flour until shaggy) so your comment makes a lot of sense.
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Great comment thread here! Just found this book…kind if a game-changer for me…
That’s on my wish list.
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i can assure you most of the world does not measure butter in pounds, we have 500g blocks here in sweden as well and i’d expect that to be the european standard at least.
The ~ was to indicate that it’s not actually that amount but close to that amount and the difference being the rounding error between metric and imperial
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Your grandma maybe
The average grandma. My grandma is 90 and grew up in a very different world.
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Great comment thread here! Just found this book…kind if a game-changer for me…
Thank you for sharing, was just thinking there needed to be some literature on simple cooking ratios. Looking forward to giving it a read
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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
We had to go through my great grandmothers hand written recipes and add measurements because of things like this, all the way back in the 90s it was an issue. A can of cherries was several ounces larger than it was then, and I guess even worse now.
She also liked to do a lot of “Add flour until it’s sticky” so we just added “Start with x amount of cups of flour then add more as needed”
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The average grandma. My grandma is 90 and grew up in a very different world.
If your Grandma is 90, she definitely didn’t grow up in the 80’s.
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Have you seen people adding it to every Mexican or Italian slow cooker recipe?
I haven’t, no. I don’t use a slow cooker that much, and when I do, it’s with my own recipes. I assumed you were referring to baking from pre-mixes.
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I haven’t, no. I don’t use a slow cooker that much, and when I do, it’s with my own recipes. I assumed you were referring to baking from pre-mixes.
I’m thinking of all those cooking videos that you find on Facebook where people dump a bunch of stuff from bags and boxes and a brick of cream cheese into a slow cooker and call it cooking.
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If your Grandma is 90, she definitely didn’t grow up in the 80’s.
I said the average grandma because I was talking about the average instead of mine. Today an average grandma is someone who grew up in the '80s. This shouldn’t have gone on this long so I’m going to try to make this very clear. I was not talking about my grandmother. I’m talking about the average grandmother. The average grandmother grew up in a post kitchen era. They grew up as a latchkey kid in the '80s tossing things in the microwave. The vast majority of grandmas don’t know how to cook anymore.
