Cooking

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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....

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.