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
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.
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”
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
Thank you for sharing, was just thinking there needed to be some literature on simple cooking ratios. Looking forward to giving it a read
I can’t speak to that book specifically and am not sure what the translation of Australian moneys to Freedom Units is, but 40 bucks for THIS sounds kinda… I wouldn’t go so far as to say “scammy” but I would definitely imply it.
Yes, baking and the like is almost entirely ratios. But you still have to understand how many parts fat and liquid butter is versus shortening versus lard versus… Yes, understanding those ratios makes it much easier to be flexible and you start realizing just how similar so many recipes are (and what the actual contribution of a given developer is). But that is more in the sense that you learn how similar two bread recipes actaully are as you make both.
The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it. Kenji is going through some stuff lately but his older videos are spectacular for “Two parts flour to one part water but also this is the texture you actually want because humidity is a thing”. But Brian Lagerstrom (and Ethan Chlebowski when he is focusing more on cooking and less on weird wellness guru’ing) have more than taken up the burden. And while it is a few tiers lower, Made With Lau is actually amazing for learning how to translate “older” recipes into actionable steps.
And if you JUST want the ratios? Just go to the library and grab a few of the foundational cookbooks for a given cuisine and look at the recipes. THOSE are the ratios and… they are generally going to be REALLY close
The best way to actually learn that is to actually just cook and read through the recipes and make tweaks as you go. The second best way is to find instructors/youtubers who understand this and convey it.
My favorite ice cream cookbook has like six recipes across 150 pages. It explains why those recipes work the way they do (milkfat percentages and cooking temperatures) and then it’s just variations on the recipes in different flavors. I’ve broken like seven ice cream machines getting it right and it’s been worth it.
That’s on my wish list.
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 😅
Uses some American brand name you’ve never heard of as an ingredient with no further elaboration
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”.
Is a cup not equivalent to 250ml?
Yes, but fresh spinach? Cooked & frozen spinach? Apart from that is a volumetric the altogether wrong choice.
depending on the cup but still, is the spinach pressed or loose? measured before or after chopping?
It’s the absurdity of specifying a volume for a leaf. A few leaves of spinach can fill a cup or a kilo of leaves can fill 250ml if shredded.
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 .
That’s the way I cook, just have made enough mistakes and so many different dishes I can put things together and make magic. On baking, my family doesn’t like fancy cakes, more like snacking cakes, those are pretty forgiving. I don’t measure rice & water, just know how it should look, and yes my husband sometimes gets annoyed that it’s not more standardized but I’m not a commercial chef I am a cook.
The exceptions - My sourdough bread, and the sourdough chocolate chip cookies - carefully measured by weight and if I am winging the bread (never the cookies) I try to still write down the measurements in case it’s the best bread I have ever made. The bread I could almost certainly make it without measuring at this point, I can tell by how it feels, what it will do, but have the scale and use it.
My mom cooked from recipes. Only from recipes . She asked her mom once how to make good biscuits, and her mom said “the water has to be very cold”. Which, honestly, would have helped me a lot. But my mom wanted a recipe!
I don’t measure rice & water
oh dude entire family agrees that i make the best rice in the family and i’ve tried to teach them how i make the rice but like it’s a big fucking argument how to make rice properly. at this point i think it’s just become a joke.
One scoop of rice. Rinsed a few times until the water is mostly clear. Throw it in the pot I always use for rice. Add water to the lower line that has developed over the years of making rice in the same pot. The upper line is from making mac and cheese so don’t use that one. Some salt. Maybe some oil or butter depending on the final dish. Place the lid on.
Bring to a boil, reduce to low. Wait until the lid harmonics change to tell you there isn’t any liquid water in there anymore. Use a fork to check the bottom of the pot for water. Done.
No one else here knows how to make rice. Everyone thinks a rice cooker would make my life easier. I had one. I tossed it because it kept scorching the rice.
once we got an electric pressure cooker it got a lot easier, but now i miss my rice pot that’s in a box somewhere in the garage.
I have five pressure canners/coolers. None electric. I don’t trust electronic devices designed to turn electricity into heat and be sold as cheap as possible to be a buy it for life item.
i mean, neither did i. someone bought it for us. i feel like such a luddite sometimes. we mostly use it for rice and making budder, which it does a fantastic job at. we’ve had ours for 8 years which i had to look up and shocks me that it’s been working that well that long.
i keep wanting to make hummus, i just never do. it makes the smoothest hummus (we put the beans in for 45 minutes, no pre-soak), but you don’t exactly need it to be electric. you got the pressure canner already.
also the lemon curd is so easy. godsdammit i gotta make lemon curd with my budder i am so lazy
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.
Yes, but you need to be quite advanced for that. This is bakers knowledge, not housewives/homecook knowledge.
using measurements like ‘a can’ is just a bad idea anyways…
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!”
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
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.
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.
so i’m trying to teach myself to cook empanadas right now and some of those leftover veg sound like some great filling
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.
I hate beets as vegetables but shredded beets in chocolate cake will fix it just like the carrot fixes the spice cake.
I like roasted beets in a bubble and squeak with other toasted root veg.
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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The products already cost more, regardless, and they HAVE sent me to a different brand in a different store that didn’t change sizes. The other one costs more than the 12oz., but it less per pound (something like $1.59 for 12oz or $1.99 for 16oz. – you get the idea). Pre-COVID, these would regularly go on sale for $.99 a pound.
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For me it is oil and not margarine, just like the example says. You will find lots of kosher recipes do not use butter because you can’t eat dairy with meat – and even if you aren’t eating meat, you still need dairy from a kosher animal. Cheese can’t have animal rennet. There are lots of rules. Anyway, it is easier to skip butter for anything that might get eaten with meat.
I figured the no butter on my own. But I would take oil over margarine almost any day of the week.
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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.
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.
I’d cry if I had to tower of hanoi every time I started up my stand mixer!
That’s pretty much my life every time I need a pot from the cabinet, shifting and stacking.
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.
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.
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.
That explains the recipe, yes.
Your grandma maybe
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.
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.
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.
Ha, my kids thought this until just a couple years ago, as they approached college age. I did always use a mix for convenience, so they were hella surprised when I made it “from scratch “
For me, it’s not just the convenience of having the dry ingredients already proportioned to save me a little time, but that I don’t consistently have the basic ingredients. It’s easier to buy a box of pancake mix, than flour plus baking soda plus whatever else is in there
For me the missing ingredient is always milk. But we have heavy cream for coffee so I can dilute that down. I’m starting to keep a pint bottle of ultra pasteurized milk in the fridge for occasions when I need milk. As long as those are sealed they keep for a very long time.
I get the shelf-stable boxes of milk from the baking aisle. They’re smaller and last longer, and so much more convenient than buying fresh if you don’t use it all the time. I’ve always got milk on hand without worrying about it going bad.
We don’t have those. I wish we did.
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.
TY, i was about to post my recipe. Beat me to it.
I’ll add though, we usually just pop everything in the blender, give it a quick pulse and we’re good. We don’t let ours raise overnight. We’re not that fancy and we like our batter runny. Thin, silver-dollar pancakes.
If we’re doing an event, we find it helpful to keep an old hersheys chocolate syrup bottle, clean it very thoroughly, and use that as a batter dispenser.
This is crazy, this is why I use a mix. Instead of having to buy all these ingredients, especially buttermilk that goes bad quickly. I can just buy a box and keep it on my shelf for months
A contributing factor of mixes is that many of us just don’t bake much anymore, don’t have regular use for the basic ingredients. Sure the basic ingrate cheaper but I don’t have any other uses for them
The benefit of a mix is “I want pancakes now.” Grammas recipe needs 1 day of planning.
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!
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.
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”?
The buckwheat panake is specifically a Breton galette. Compare with the galette des rois which does use puff pastry. But you’re too high on your own “America bad” farts to consider that words are used in more than one way.
Same only with Pasteis De Nata:
https://www.biggreenegg.eu/en/inspiration/recipes/pasteis-de-nata
My problem: There are different puff pastries out there and so I made the recipe THREE TIMES to figure out the best one to use.
Spoiler - The most expensive one.
Dufour.
https://dufourpastrykitchens.com/puff-pastry-dough/
Here’s the difference:
“first enclosing a “butter block” in the dough”
Compared with:
https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/product/puff-pastry-sheets/
“VEGETABLE OILS (PALM, SOYBEAN, HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED)”
Store brand is the same.
None of them were AWFUL, just the Dufour is head and shoulders above the others, and 4x the price.
Cream cheese? Does that belong in that list?
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.
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.
Oh, fair. I don’t have Facebook.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s not a recipe I’m ever using.
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.
This makes me wonder if a quarter cup of butter was ever less than half of a whole stick… 🤔
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.
In Germany it’s 250g, which is way off 226.80g if you’re doing something as precise as baking can be.
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
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.
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.
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!
