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This explains everything.
I made some things from hand me down recipes recently that I had memorized and they seemed a bit off. So I dug up the recipes (a can of this and a container of that) and assumed that I was going insane.
These c°ck$uck!ng m0th3rf^ck€r$… Grrr!
Okay but some of my favorite people in life have been cock suckers. Which is why I hate it as a pejorative.
Everyone I know has an asshole, yet here we are...
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....
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.
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.
using measurements like 'a can' is just a bad idea anyways..
While this is true, Betty Crocker is shooting themselves in the foot with this.
Back in the day having a recipe for a specific box made cooking easier and locked people into one brand of ingredients.
This move is undoing a lot of the marketing they did back in the 40s and 50s
Yeah they're really burning that 1940s marketing asset
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!”
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.
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.
You can also science cooking. Meat thermometers are absolutely fantastic.
Its kinda weird to read she was dissappointed because the recipe was "passed down" by her mother. If its a box mix you add like eggs and water to how much 'recipe' is there to pass down? Its not quite the same as a full recipe that uses a certain brand spice mix for a base or something, the box is the recipe.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. Is measuring things out in grams and mixing the ingredients too complicated? Americans rely too much on corporate ultra-processed food and then get angry when they get shafted.
To this point, you can make cake mix. It's flour, sugar, leavening agents or yeast / baking powder, salt, and anti-clumping agents / preservatives.
Just take 10 minutes and mix that shit together yourself and leave out the preservatives. You'll get a better cake and recipe worth passing down.
I blame processed food manufacturers for turning cookbooks from instruction manuals into marketing vehicles. A recipe that requires 2 eggs, 450g of flour and Uncle Whizbang's Special Baking Powder(tm) is an ad, and not a recipe.
For this reason I've started collecting vintage cookbooks that are actual culinary manuals, and not advertising that you pay for.
I get what you are saying, because a lot of those recipes were magazine ads or from the package themselves, but name brand does sometimes help.
Trying to make some recipes from the UK in North America was a challenge, because self rising flour brand Y is different than self rising flour brand X.
And if you counter with "just make your own self rising flour" Then you have to check is it Canadian Flour or American Flour, because the Canadian Flour has much higher protein and absorbs more water. And the rising agents vary.
But those "recipes" fall apart if the brand changes internal ingredients.
This isn't about the instructions on the box. There are other recipes that make use of box mixes as base ingredients.
I hit this with the chocolate banana cheesecake I posted here last week.
I've been making variants of it for some 30 years now, and while most of the ingredients are raw ingredients, it does call for an entire 12 ounce bag of miniature chocolate chips. You have to use mini chips because of the low baking temp, full size chips don't melt all the way and give it a weird texture.
Imagine my surprise last week to find that Nestle morsels only come in 10 and 20 ounce bags now.
Fortunately, the STORE brand was still a standard 12 ounces and the recipe still works. Fine. I didn't want to give Nestle the money anyway. ;)
It's always best when you can avoid funding Nestle
If you're going to use ounces you either make the result divisible by 4 or you use fucking metric. 10 in ounces defeats the entire point of 16 ounces in a pound. Fucking 5/8ths of a pound. Great unit of sale, very useful.
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.
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.
Because of this I won't buy any box mixes anymore - they were almost always overpriced for what you got and didn't contain anything magical... They just made things simpler. I'll make my cakes and cookies from scratch now and save a fortune.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Great comment thread here! Just found this book...kind if a game-changer for me...
https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman/Ruhlmans-Ratios/9781416571728
This just reminds me of recipes that are like "how to make homemade soft pretzel. step 1, buy pretzel dough". I get that some boxed mixes are just pre measured ingredients, so why not learn the ratios and make them yourself?
"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.