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
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…
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.
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?
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!
“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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Hah! I used Dufour also. My choices were that and Pepperidge Farm but I knew the critical part was it had to use real butter. Looking at the prices I knew that PF being half the price meant that they had to make some serious compromises. If I’m going to eat a bunch of calories I’m going to do it right.
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.
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.
Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.
If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.
So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.
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.
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 😅
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.
I’m curious, do you use the first line on your middle finger to measure water?
That’s how my grandmother taught us (pot and rice cooker).
i used to use my index finger, now i’m all about different ratios of water to rice depending on the grain because i’m fancy. we’ve got a 25 lb bag of jasmine we’re working through that i do 3water:2rice + 1T butter + 1/2 t salt.
Current project is good garlic rice, so i’ve been sauteing up some garlic butter (for 1 cup of rice, 10 cloves in 4T butter, then adding all the cloves and 1T of the garlic butter), but it’s not quite garlicky enough. I’m not sure whether i need more cloves or to make the butter more garlicky somehow.
You and my dad would get along great. He uses a whole bulb; his fried rice version has this toasted garlic flavor that’s just tasty.
My SIL adds Better Than Bouillon Roasted Garlic with her garlic rice (I dont remember if it’s a teaspoon or tablespoon).
Another version we learned was adding a combo of grated garlic and baked garlic; they both have different yet distinct flavors. That’s my aunt’s version and she uses chicken broth (Alton Brown’s recipe).
Lol on the fancy… good for you. You’re right though, different kinds of rice require different amounts of water. We already got that lecture from our grandparents a looooong time ago.
The problem with that is that the size of the pot changes the volume of water with a linear finger measure.
Like for extremes if you had a test tube shaped pot with a foot of rice deep and only a finger depth of water is way different than a giant wide pot where grains area single layer and then a finger depth over top.
That’s why you use a rice cooker.
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.
The crispy rice at the bottom of your pot is tahdig in Persian, tutong in Tagalog. In some cultures and families, they fight over the crispy rice, lol.
Yeah but it kinda messes up fried rice
You don’t use that part for the fried rice. You just eat it.
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”.
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…
Seems like you took that pretty personally 😂
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.
Your grandma maybe
The average grandma. My grandma is 90 and grew up in a very different world.
Whoms grandma is around 45-50?
Assume two generations of people having kids at 18 years old putting gramdma at at least 36. Assume the average kid is between the ages of 0 18 putting them at 9. 9+36 is 45.
Kids born in 1980 and growing up in the 80s are old enough to be grandparents now.
That is by no means „average“
using measurements like ‘a can’ is just a bad idea anyways…
Which is why a lot of recipes will say “One 14 oz can of…”
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
That’s call brand recognition and trust.
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. ;)
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.
It’s always best when you can avoid funding Nestle
