It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.
The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.
That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.
Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.
I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...
But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....
Cooking is not always about making the ultimate gourmet meal, it's about connection and tradition. Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives and makes it's way into traditions.
Grandma's secret recipe that uses a box mix will taste 10000x better than anything you think you can come up with from scratch. Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise, it's not something you just do perfectly the first time. To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience, or a box mix.
>Don't be so snobby about cake ingredients.
Be snobby about cake ingredients.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9331555/
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Sorry, I couldn't find a good link to describe the effect but did see numerous websites mentioning that alcohol can worsen allergy symptoms.
My allergist informed me that alcohol dilates the blood vessels allowing more allergens to pass thru. My anecdotal evidence is that I do seem to suffer from more food allergies when I drink alcohol. Foods that I have a mild allergy to become seem to be more problematic when I drink.
[1] ex https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06224-3
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/29/the-tru...
The linked article explains it quite clearly, it’s a good read.
Is this a troll? I thought it was pretty well understood that processed food is linked with eating and nutritional issues. I have personally found a strong correlation between food quality and the lack of gums, modified starches, and other artificial ingredients.
A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
News alert: the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, but many people, like parent poster here, cannot let go:
https://www.sott.net/article/441076-The-cholesterol-hypothes...
Most of the world's agriculture concerns growing commodity crops to feed animals - 'big beef'. This is big business and the source of all hatchet jobs on Ancel Keys. Their message is simple, you don't need fruit and vegetables, you need steak and butter!
Find me one centenarian that got there by eating a diet heavy in saturated fats. Just one!!!
If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting.
This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.
> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker
Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?
But it wasn't better. I like to get a nice glossy top on a brownie with a fudgy consistency under it. The glossy top cracks when you bite into it and it's amazing. But there's no way to do that with a box mix. The top comes from whipping air into the butter, egg and sugar mixture but a box mix is one bag. You try to beat air into it and you develop the gluten and it turns out terrible.
Box mixes are acceptable. But they don't beat from scratch by a long shot, unless its your first time or to ever for baking.
It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.
Frosting is a different topic - totally agree there, but I haven't seen any blind taste tests on that one.
The professional bakers around me who do a dozen cakes a day or whatnot are all pre-made mixes, maybe some small modifications to the mix, and from-scratch frostings. I'm not sure I could even find a local spot with cakes made from scratch - at least in the traditional sense. The spots making 200 cakes a day perhaps, but those are going to look a lot more like the mixes you buy from Sysco or whatnot.
95% of bakeries are using a box mix and a packet of jello pudding. That's the secret.
The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.
If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
Could be a "New Coke"[1] thing, where people just like the one with more sugar. There's a reason food companies pack the stuff into everything - it (usually) works.
You will be surprised to learn that brands have very differently tasting products developed for different markets. Often even under the same name.
This is an issue with Kellogg's cereal and Lay's potato chips in China. They purport to be available. But they're not the same product.
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a good idea; it entirely defeats the purpose of branding.
It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that.
If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really.
Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.
Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.
Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.
Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.
Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.
Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
Also, why would calling that "snobby" imply that I don't know how to bake? That's a lot more of a snobby statement, to say that I must be unskilled since I don't judge food based solely on having "the best flavor". I worked in a bakery and have made a lot of baked goods, from scratch, in a professional setting.
I'm not saying boxed cakes are the best cakes. They have consistently good texture and moisture, which is not an easy feat. I would like the emphasize "consistency". Yes, any child can make a simple cake recipe. But to do it well every time, in any kitchen, at different scales, is not trivial. The flavors are not always the best but that's where you can customize it.
Sure I would take a well-made made-from-scratch cake over a boxed one any day. But the point of these recipes is the traditions behind it. Part of why mom and grandma could make a whole Thanksgiving feast and array of desserts is because many shortcuts can be taken, including using a boxed mix. That efficiency is part of the tradition behind recipes handed down from grandparents, in the same way that "poverty food" is born from constraints of the era.
The value behind creative expressions is not just the artifact but the efforts and intentions of the creators behind it.
Respect for working in a bakery, just hope you haven't got too many burn scars on your forearms from doing long night shifts. I am in broad agreement with you and I appreciate the difficulties of making a consistent product, particularly when there are variables in temperature, seasonal availability of ingredients, lots of machinery to keep running and workers that are probably taking a bit more than cake to see their shifts through.
In the UK, as far a cakes are concerned, you either have a 'bought one' or something you make from scratch yourself. There is no in-between and a cake mix would be frowned on by middle class snobs as 'having cheated'. Or, failing that, taken as an insult. A 'bought one' would be entirely understandable, and what you might expect for birthday celebrations, at home or in the workplace. But a cake mix?
A home made cake is 'proof of work' and the use of a cake mix just undermines it. Approximately the same amount of time is spent in the kitchen and the oven is on for the same amount of time, plus there is the same amount of washing up.
Advertising these processed foods started a lot earlier in America than anywhere else. There are geographical challenges that make this understandable. But, over time, the food companies coalesced into a dozen gigantic mega-corporations and brands that once stood for quality and no adulterated ingredients (from the days before the FDA) now stand for adulterated ingredients.
In the UK we used to have Quaker owned confectionery companies such as Cadburys where the original product was all about health, happy workers and all these good things. They automated processes because they were ideologically against slavery. But, generations on, with the likes of Cadburys owned by the likes of Kraft or Nestle, it isn't like that. The milk and cocoa content goes down, the sugar and palm oil goes up. The Fairtrade cocoa goes and the 'Rainforest Alliance' cocoa comes in, and you can guess the ethics of the latter are not to the standards of the former.
None of these mega-corporations pay any tax. They can avoid doing so by setting up a shell company in a tax haven that owns the rights to the branding, to then create subsidiaries that then license the branding for vast sums, as per the Starbucks business model, to never make any profit since they have these extra costs that have to be paid to tax havens.
Back to stupid British snobbery, I would prefer one of your mass-made cakes any day over something that has been made by a snobby Brit as the 'ultimate in cake', where you can't just enjoy it, you have to express to the baker that every mouthful is like the greatest, most orgasmic experience in the history of the universe, for which you are eternally grateful. In these scenarios, you daren't wolf the cake down as that would be disrespectful, and you daren't ask for anything more than the thinnest slice since any more would be deemed greedy.
This part interests me. I have no idea what seals of approval are worthwhile or not. I just see that they are printed on the package and assume it counts for something. Is there some controversy relater to cocoa in this case?
Getting a fair trade certification requires a supply chain inspection, and in theory, would not be possible to get for producers which have child slavery in the supply chain. Though of course, supply chain inspections are complicated and I believe this is by no means perfect (nothing is).
Rainforest Alliance certified has nothing to do with ethics in treatment of the humans involved in the supply chain, just environmental impact.
Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a distinctive taste and texture which I really don’t like. If I made a cake at home and it ended up tasting like something from the supermarket I’d consider it a failure.
If the US can make you pay the income tax difference when living abroad then I fail to see why we can't do the same for companies using these kinds of schemes.
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if all the Starbuckses disappeared?
Do you have a source? I really haven't met anyone using cake mixes to make cakes.
But if you mean they use butter instead of milking a cow directly and producing the butter then yes, they use processed food.
This matters when you are trying to sell a product, not so much when you are cooking for friends and family as long as you get into the ballpark which isn't really that hard. Little variances and surprises just make home cooking more interesting.
Grandmas should not be cooking cakes from boxes of cake dust, they should be using flour and producing a cake that tastes like it was cooked by a grandma. That is the natural order of things.
Being made with traditional methods and ingredients, is per se a virtue. If grandma cooks fries you wouldn't complain that McDonalds does it better. Home cooking is great because it was cooked at home using the limited equipment and ingredients of a home kitchen that give it a natural and traditional taste.
And the odds that ingredients found in nature are ideal ingredients by sheer chance are about 0%. And we haven't been making cakes long enough to for evolution to turn natural into ideal.
Let people like what they like.
If the fries are bad, I definitely would. I might not complain where the grandma could hear, but food doesn't magically become good because a grandma cooks it. I've had plenty of godawful meals cooked up by grandmas.
Work isn't inherently valuable. We value the results of that work.
Made my day. I would bet you my monthly salary, if I wouldn't have to suspect - based on the quoted sentence - that your taste buds are already fully dorked up based on the crap you put into your cake hole from years of industrialized and processed food-simulacrum.
> Baking is actually quite nuanced and difficult and precise
It actually isn't once you understand a few basic principals. If you need a box of cake dust to bake, you cannot bake. That's it. And if grandma needs that, she actually never learned to bake. Baking is so damn simple for 90+ percent of cakes. Yes, if you want to get all fancy - we are talking a different ball game. But the sames can be said about cooking for fine dining.
> To get consistent results in baking takes a lot of experience
Just not true. Learn the basic principles (share of dry vs wet ingredients and such base level things) and not just try copying a recipe, basically cargo culting.
About the taste of things: When I learned what actual food tastes like it was in many ways interesting. First it was very often quite disappointing. Because a lot of things did not taste how I would have expected they would taste. Take strawberries for example. They did not taste as sweet, not as "intense", bland even. But over time, I got to learn the different tastes of different varieties of strawberries and how rich they are, a richness, that I never knew. My taste buds "just" had to unlearn the overly intense way industry does with aroma and shit.
I had to learn what strawberries (and many other things) really taste, compared to the artificially aromatised crap the industry is telling is is "strawberry flavor".
Nowadays, with over 100 varieties of tomatoes for example in our own greenhouses, I enjoy a vastness of taste variations when eating a simple salad. Or baked tomatoes from the oven. I would never, never trade that for industrialized crap.
> Processed food is a normal part of every day people's lives
Poor every day people. I pity them. And yes: I might definitely be a snob, when it comes to what goes into my body. My body is the only one I got - why should I treat it to sub par crap.
I'm sorry, but this reads like a piece of Ignatius Reilly dialog.
If you want to reproduce the texture a recipe had, then those are what you need. If not, then don't.
But it's not like flour or corn starch or sugar or corn syrup or baking powder are fundamentally different from most of the ingredients listed. It's all refined and modified and engineered. Baking is chemistry. And if you want to be able to make a wide range of textures and tastes, you need to be able to tinker with all those things.
Obviously you don't have to, most people stick to the most commonly available ingredients. But then you're just more restricted in the possibilities of what you can make. Maybe that's fine. All depends on what you want to make.
That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? Something tells me this is about that bias people have, the one where long chemical names are all bad, because they're chemicals, and the only good chemicals one may use is ones that are common enough to receive a non-intimidating normal name. It's all chemistry all the way down.
Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.
Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
If that's the reason to dismiss them, that's a very shallow reason.
Also the powdered fats lack the flavor that wet ones do.
Here's the ingredient list for Toro Brownies, translated by me.
Sugar, wheat flour, reduced-fat cocoa, baking powder(calcium phosphate, sodium carbonate), coffee, salt, vanillin
I'm not sure about the fat reduced cocoa, for all I know that might just be what I think of as normal cocoa powder, and the rest are just regular ingredients anyone would use. No fancy surfactants and powdered fats etc.
I buy one bag that's dirt cheap and has everything I need including instructions. And it just has the same stuff I would be using anyway so there's no downside. No scary ingredients. Just freshly baked goods on demand.
First of all, properly stored flour, sugar, and cocoa powder doesn't attract bugs. Glass jars that seal well, done. Hell even plastic tubs. It expires pretty rarely as well, surely you can just bang out a couple of loaves of bread before that happens?
Anyway, yeah, is it not like, a very normal thing to keep flour, sugar, baking soda, cocoa powder, salt, perhaps yeast on hand? Butter, oil, some pasta, maybe some rice? Like, how do you cook otherwise, just buy small batches of these things every time?
> That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.
My point was that these added ingredients aren't special space magic, they all have a purpose and that purpose is something home bakers can often replicate with simple ingredients.
I'm refuting the notion that it's impossible to best the box because of the exotic ingredients.
I make no claim as to whether box vs common ingredients are better/healthier/etc. They are what they are.
But I wish you would have replied to the comment making that claim. Not one by a different person making a different point.
> That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason?
I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear.
Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.
If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
> I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.
I don't think so. bruce511 was replying to a completely different part of the ancestor comment, disliking the list of chemicals regardless of whether they do something unique, and tavavex was rebutting a dislike of chemicals.
> If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.
I don't understand what you mean by "dismissal". When I'm "dismissing" them it is in the context of "you don't need these to make delicious cakes competitive with the box goods." And the reason I'm dismissing is because of availability to a home cook.
It's fair to point out the parent comment was talking about the fear of chemicals in the foods, not a concern I share. I was more writing in terms of whether or not you actually need these ingredients to be successful baking.
I'd further say that, especially with food, there's no strict "bad/good". The ingredients are simply different. While it does impact the final outcome, you likely won't taste much difference if you used canola oil or corn oil in a recipe, for example. Does that make corn or canola bad/good? No, they are just different ingredients that accomplish the same goal. With that in mind, availability becomes a much more important thing to consider. So I can dismiss the need for xanthan gum for a home cook because I know that potato starch will fill the same role while being easy to find in the store. It's more available, not better.
Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/bakery-p...
I checked my lagest local grocery store chain and they do have one brand of cake mixes. They never really crossed my mind before.
Chocolate chip and two types of pundcake.... though that's both among the simplest baking recipies so i still don't quite see the point.
There's also pre-made pie dough, that i could see using.
You can get it quite quick with a food processor or a kitchenaid mixer, but kneading such a dough by hand and having the time to let rest, flatten with a rolling pin and pre-bake in pan, push pie up a bit in the effort ranking.
So i feel there is real value in quickly putting a pre-flattened doough sheet in a pan, especially if some chemistry can skip the pre-bake step.
So i see the appeal much more for this product over pound cake mix which is just four, sugar, egg and leveling agent.
North America overall contains many more people than the EU. (340 + 129 + 40 for just USA, Mexico, Canada, plus another ~50MM in smaller countries. 560ish total)
These companies must be making bank.
It depends on how much cake you bake though. For many ingredients you'll need less than the smallest packaging size - and much less than packaging sizes that aren't way overpriced.
I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.
Looking for cake mix history in sweden descibe its initial import from USA and England as American style cookies and brownies became popular.
Its American association is well founded. And i did not use the word wierd. I simply pointed out that this ubiquity of "cake mix" baked goods is not reflected in my experience, and may be more concentrated in USA.
In particular in take issue with phrasing cake mix as "family recipe" as even the brands i can find at my store are younger than one generation, and has nowhere near the cultural footprint that they seem to have in USA.
This isn't meant to reply to the rest of the comment, but as an American I don't think I've ever seen or eaten a pound cake mix?
The recipe is the name... You either make it for $1 or you go to the grocery/bakery and grab the $2 pound cake sitting on the counter.
Most mixes people buy (at least around here) are brownies, cookies, and spongecake.
Poundcake vary greatly beyond a "pound".
If anything, spongecake is more strictly defined, originally not using leveling agents, relying on the air bubbles introduced in the beating of the eggs.
But thats semantics. Perhaps spongecake is more recognised as the umbrella term.
They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.
If you want to precisely emulate it for the fun of it then more power to you but if you just want a good cake then no you don't need to. Basic flour, baking soda, sugar, cocoa powder, etc. will do the trick just fine.
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat.
My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes.
When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?
As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.
I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
And since you're doing it twice a year, honestly, get 2 boxes. If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Would I reverse-engineer the box? No. That sounds like work. But its not hard to find recipes online.
Of course with every problem comes opportunity. What I see here is an opportunity for a devoted grandson to box up 18oz of premix for grandma. Grandma's "secret" was that she "cheated", her pleasure was in the feeding not the baking. Enabling grandma to continue this going forward is the easiest thing ever.
The lack of empathy throughout your comments here is staggering.
I’m a fantastic baker. I can bake a much better cake than my grandma ever could, but I can’t bake the cake I had in my childhood without a box. “Just but two” is nonsense dumb advice.
While you may understand the nostalgic aspect from a logical level, I don't think you understand it beyond that. This next line:
> But it's not like there aren't a zillion from-scratch brownie recipes to choose from.
To me anyways really indicates that. I know there are a zillion from-scratch recipes online and in books and in other media. That isn't the point.
> If throwing away some extra premix destroys the pleasure, then that's a low bar.
Once again, I think you are totally missing the point. I think this captures why it's a big deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8TEJtQRhw Betty Crocker is effectively doing that.
Without understanding it at more of emotional level, I can see why this doesn't resonate with you. Unfortunately, that also means it is unlikely that you will able to understand why it is a big deal and why other folks are arguing with you the way they are.
You don't usually make a particular type of cookie every week or two. You might only make it once every six months. And your cake mix won't stay good exposed to oxygen for six months.
It's not about being helpless, c'mon.
"Standard" is not standard at all.
For what it's worth, flour is used almost daily here. (We keep several kinds to hand.) We make pizza (ie make the dough) at least once a week. Bread on occasion. Batters for fried fish. As a thickener in sauces and gravys. For making fresh pasta, and so on.
All this of course is very cultural. We cook at home. If we eat out once a month it's a lot. We don't get take-aways or fast food. Because (frankly) they're just not that good.
So yes, our "standard" leans towards a well-stocked, varied, pantry.
And I completely get that this is weird by US standards (although common outside the US).
There are a lot of different kinds of flour. At most well stocked grocers in North America you will find pastry flour, all purpose flour, bread flour, organic flour, self rising flour, etc. That’s just the white wheat flour that you could use to make a cake. Don’t forget that whole wheat and different varietals of wheat exist. If you make cake with bread flour it is going to be very different from one made with pastry flour. There is no such thing as “standard flour”. Hell, even the mill that you use to grind the wheat berry can drastically change the nature of your flour.
That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
Use that one. It's flour, but like for all purposes. You can make cake with it fine.
That's just another unnecessary mix you can buy individually.
> That’s the whole point of this article. That what you think of as a standard might not be a standard forever, or it might not be a standard at all.
Flour types are not up to some corporation's marketing team. And for home cooking they don't really matter as much as you are implying. Just get the types best suited for the most common thing(s) you are making and make substitutes for the rest.
Also, there's going to be one type that is always stocked more than others. That's your standard flour. You can use it for most recipes (cake and bread) just fine.
"Oh no, the premix is a different size, no more cookies ever" - seems like a pretty helpless response to me.
First World Problems I guess...
I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.
It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.
When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?
It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
It’s very cool that you use fresh bulk ingredients for everything, so this article isn’t about you.
People ITT are so quick to get all Richard Stallman on their grandmothers for having the gall to use a pre-measured can of Cream of Mushroom soup in their casserole recipe.
Relying on processed flour and similar staples is hardly the same as relying on a specific unique cake mix.
My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.
We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.
There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)
>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.
>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.
>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”
>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.
>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.
[0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...
Even in that context, they couldn't bring themselves to recommend against palm oil. Their sign on that topic remarked that palm oil requires much less land per unit of oil produced than other oils, making it a pro-environment product.
They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.
But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag.
This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
>If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
But you can identity it. Unless this is your very first time buying the product, you more or less know what its packaging looks like. If you buy a can of soda that's half empty you wouldn't think that it's so the liquid doesn't break.
Also, I've never heard anyone complain about the size of bags of chips relative to their contents. I've heard the explanations, but not the actual complaints. Is that something people actually do?
And even for chips, "bag of air" isn't the only viable packaging method. Of course others aren't without tradeoffs either.
But "when people complain that the purpose of packaging is to fool consumers, they are being stupid" is something you can deduce from that.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.