Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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

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!”

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.

Yeah but a can is basically one unit. Once a can is opened it usually has to be used relatively quickly, so I would much rather use an entire can than measure out a fractional number of cans to be precise with measurements. It depends on the ingredient of course but eg with beans it really doesn't matter to get the exact weight.

Which is why a lot of recipes will say "One 14 oz can of..."

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 .

Uses some American brand name you’ve never heard of as an ingredient with no further elaboration

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.

Okay but some of my favorite people in life have been cock suckers. Which is why I hate it as a pejorative.

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.

so i'm trying to teach myself to cook empanadas right now and some of those leftover veg sound like some great filling

You must do some high stakes cooking. I always tweak recipes, sometimes even if I've never made it before.

So many family recipes are documented this way, though, so it's a significant problem when these are handed down.

"I just skip grandma's chili because she didn't record it using volume or weight for everything" isn't a thing people say or do.

That doesn't really help when you need X amount of something and everything is sold in Y amounts.

While some ingredients this isn't an issue, I've run into this for pasta sauce/paste, coconut milk, canned beans, etc. which are hard to work around.

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.

This isn't about the instructions on the box. There are other recipes that make use of box mixes as base ingredients.

"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 didn't have pretzel dough so instead I used pizza dough, and instead of salt I used mozzarella cheese. Delicious recipe!"

...

Now I want pretzza.

But pretzles are harder than average because you need to boil them in a lye solution and who has lye hanging around these days? Bagels are only slightly easier because their boil doesn't require lye.

I know for cake mixes, at least, they add some chemicals that improve the texture and moisture retention of the cake. It's stuff you'd never find in the baking isle, but it improves the resulting cake so much that many professional cake bakers just use the box mix. They have access to the same food suppliers and would just end up duplicating the work of giant conglomerates research.

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.

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....

It's brain dead easy cooking and people that do it were probably taught by their parents to.

Boxed baking mixes sell better if they still require eggs to be added. Makes people feel like they're actually baking, as opposed to the just-add-water stuff

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.

You have a different quantity of leavening relative to ypur fats due to the size change. The whole thing will be goopy until you sort out the baking soda/powder which can get difficult since you use so little relative to the volume of the batch.

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.

Sound like peak 50/60 style cooking

This is the way.

Thank you for sharing, was just thinking there needed to be some literature on simple cooking ratios. Looking forward to giving it a read

That's on my wish list.

Yeah, that's not a recipe I'm ever using.

HAHAHA that recipe is half a dump cake.

Stuff like that is available to buy at places like bulk barn. You can buy by weight or volume there.

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 butter

In 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.

I haven't made Zatarans Jambalaya in years but I remember having this exact problem. I would have to use like 1 1/3 packages of sausage and end up with 2/3 of a sausage leftover

Now I want to re-watch Father of the Bride.

Also the good recipes tell you the weight of the can, if using cans (almost always seems to be things like whole peeled tomatoes or chipotle chilies in adobo)

Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.

Well...

World War 1 happened. there was rationing.

Then the 20's happened and grandmothers disappear from the historical record, they either became flappers or were shot to death with a Thompson submachine gun in a speakeasy. RIP roaring 20's grandmas.

Then the Great Depression happened and the only foodstuffs that existed were peanut butter and saltine crackers.

Then World War 2 happened, there was rationing again.

Rationing ended in 1947, and basically everything in America changes. GI's returning from war 1. fuck the fucking fuck out of the women, resulting in more pregnancies than Earth had ever seen before. There's a housing boom, they skin the continent of old growth pine to build suburbs, with adjacent business districts full of supermarkets complete with large parking lots for the family car. These supermarkets are full of mass manufactured packaged food, some of which use technologies developed for military rations. We enter the era of the boxed cake mix, the canned cake icing, and the frozen TV dinner. All of this is new and exciting, and the marketing poses industrial made foods such as shortening as more scientific and purified than natural food.

I got this from a comment under a Youtube video, responding to why Jello was so popular in the 1960's: Because a gelatin mold was seen as an impressive feat of housewifery. Much earlier than 1960 and gelatin is a pain in the ass to make but now that it's a commercial product that comes in a box, you pour the packet into some hot water and stir and bam, it became quite a trend. The same happened with cake. Pour a box of powder in a bowl, dump in 2 cups of water, stir it a little and then pour into pans and bake. Betty Crocker had to take the egg powder back out of the mix because market research showed housewives felt underwhelmed, baking with all-in-one mix didn't feel like enough of a project. So make them provide their own eggs I guess.

So the Greatest Generation, my grandparents, bake like that. Because all the hip keen 25 year olds are baking like this, MOM, I can make a whole cake in an hour, I'm icing while you're still sifting that flour. That's how they teach their boomer daughters how to bake, and the average boomer housewife is at a loss as to how to bake a cake without a box of Betty Crocker.

Gen X has never and will never exist.

Millennial women seem have a complicated relationship to baking. On the one hand, there's an entire genre of television/Youtube about baking cakes aimed pretty much at millennial women. Find me a woman in her 30's that doesn't have a strongly formed opinion on fondant. That's what they watch when they're temporarily sick of True Crime. On the other hand, feminism's distaste for women in the kitchen has lead to a lot of women having no discernible cooking skills. I'm a better cook than most of the women I've dated, and most of the women I've dated I wouldn't trust to own a sifter or a rolling pin, particularly the city dwelling Democrat voters.

Gen Z? Like they're ever going to live somewhere with an oven.

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.

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.

There are recipes based on package sizes which is fine for chocolate chips or nuts but becomes intensely problematic when it is leavening ingredients. Half-a box of bisquick was a valid measure when there was one size on the shelf.

Some of my family recipes go back 150-250 years so along the way some of the collection contains cards calling for a tin of x, y, or z. I still sometimes use a ham glaze that calls for a bottle of coca cola.

You are confusing baking with cooking.

Baking is much closer to a science than cooking. It is all about precise measurements, and you have to be a very good baker to "wing it" and end up with a consistently good end product.

American here. I always sucked at baking until I discovered a UK site using the metric master race measurements.

It was all in grams instead of tablespoons/ounces/cups.

Suddenly my shit was perfect...

If it says a couple spoonfuls then you are golden to abandon all fear and just go with it. That's half my curry recipes. How much curry do you want? How much can you handle?

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.